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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 




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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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New-Church Poididar Series. [No. 9. 



THE 



GARDEJS]" of EDEN: 



GIVING 



THE SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION AND 
TRUE MEANING OF THE STORY. 



BY 

Rev. JOHN DOUGHTY, 

Author of "The World Beyond." 






PHILADELPHIA: 
SWEDENBOEG PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION, 

900 Chestnut Street. 






Copyright. 
SWEDENBORG PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION. 

1885. 



J 




PREFACE. 



^f^T the present day there is not much openly 
W^ avowed infidelity in Christian lands. But 
there are reasons for believing that there 
exists a vast amount of it in a latent form, and no 
inconsiderable portion even in the churches them- 
selves. 

And since it prevails among some of the most 
thoughtful and honest people, the questions, What 
is the cause of it ? and How is it to be effectually 
remedied? deserve the serious consideration of 
every friend of mankind, and especially of every 
teacher of the Christian religion. 

The chief cause undoubtedly is, the mistaken 
idea in regard to the Sacred Scripture and the 
method by which its true meaning is to be 
elicited, which has become so prevalent through- 
out the bounds of Christendom. This idea is, 
that the written Word has but one meaning, and 
that, the meanins: conveved to the natural under- 



iv Preface, 

standing by the natural or sensuous interpretation 
of the words of Scripture. 

By this false but prevalent method, the Bible is 
reduced to the level of a human composition, is 
robbed of its Divine spirit and life, and much of 
it made to teach what every rational mind sees to 
be very unreasonable — some of it unintelligible 
and even puerile. No wonder, therefore, that 
questions like the following, which Mr. Ingersoll 
is reported to have asked in a recent lecture, should 
arise in many thoughtful minds : 

*^Is there any intelligent man or woman now 
in the world, who believes in the Garden of Eden 
story [literally interpreted] ? '^ " Does any human 
being now believe that God made man of dust, 
and a woman of a rib, and put them in a garden, 
and put a tree in the middle of it ? Was n't there 
rooai outside of the garden to put his tree if He 
did n't want people to eat his apples ? If I did n't 
want a man to eat my fruit, I would not put him 
in my orchard." 

What, then, is the remedy? We know of but 
one ; and that is, to teach people the real nature 
and purpose of Holy Scripture — to show them 
wherein its divinity consists, what is the law that 



Preface. v 

governs in a truly div^ine composition, and what 
the method therefore by which its true meaning 
is to be unfolded. All of which is so fully and 
clearly revealed in the writings of Emanuel Sw^e- 
denborg, that every one who carefully and prayer- 
fully examines these writings, is sure to see it. 
And the Christian ministers w^ho refuse or neg- 
lect to do so, are left without excuse, — and will 
continue, however unintentionally and uncon- 
sciously, to foster the growing skepticism of our 
times. 

The purpose of this little volume is, to lift the 
reader's mind above the sensuous plane of thought, 
and to show him, by a method of interpretation 
applicable alike to all other parts of Scripture, the 
spiritual and true meaning of that old Garden of 
Eden story. 




CONTEI^rTS. 



I. PAGE 

The Garden 9 

II. 
The Two Trees 26 

III. 
The W03IAN 44 

IV. 
The Serpekt 61 

V. 
The Forbidden Fruit 77 

The Curse .94 

VII. 
The Expulsion 110 

VIII. 
The Flaming Sword 126 

IX. 

The Eestoration 141 

vii 



The Garden of Eden. 



THE GARDEN. 




And the Lord God planted a garden east- 
ward in Eden; and there hepid the man 
ivhom he had formed.— Gen. ii. 8. 

^HE figures of the Bible put together by the 
rigid rules of arithmetic, inform us that the 
world was created about six thousand years 
ago ; but science with its unanswerable logic fixes 
the time of its creation some hundreds of thou- 
sands of years earlier. The letter of Genesis de- 
clares that it was spoken into existence by the fiat 
of an almighty God, and completed in seven days ; 
but science asserts that countless ages elapsed 
from the beginning of the earth to the period 
when it became fit for human life. The Bible 
seems to teach that we are all, of whatever color 
or conformation, descendants of the one man, 
Adam ; but science casts a doubt upon this ap- 
parent teaching, which almost amounts to cer- 
tainty. Hence religion and science are in con- 
flict ; and the skeptical mind which is born to 

9 



10 The Garden of Eden. 

doubt, and has educated itself to deny what is not 
scientifically proved, condemns religion and sides 
with science, and floats off, full often honestly 
enough, from its own standpoint, into the un- 
known seas of unbelief and the dark ocean of 
infidelity. 

And common sense comes in to have its say. 
The Bible seems to hinge the whole fate of the 
human race, for countless ages, on the eating of 
the fruit of a single tree by one human pair. It 
seems to place our heavenly Father in the posi- 
tion of having set a snare for the first created 
man and woman, which they were not endued 
with strength to resist. It presents to us a talk- 
ing serpent with powers of apt persuasion. It 
affirms that the man and his wife were so blind 
that they could not even behold their own naked- 
ness until the eating of the forbidden fruit brought 
it to their sight. It makes sorrow and toil and 
pain and death for all mankind, even into the un- 
known ages, dependent on a single act of two 
untutored individuals, of which their myriad chil- 
dren were all innocent. 

Thus the narrative of the Garden of Eden be- 
comes so confused and incredible, that common 
sense is either forced to give way to a childlike 
faith in what is written, or to throw to the winds 
all confidence in Bible history. But can true sci- 
ence and true religion ever part company ? Can 



The Garden. 11 

common sense and revelation be really at variance ? 
Would the God who made all science, have given 
a religion which denies its plainest propositions 
and ignores its most unquestioned truths? Or 
would He who endowed his creatures with what- 
ever common sense thev may possess, have re- 
vealed a written Word which could not stand the 
test of common sense ? Skeptics and believers 
alike will answer, No ! 

The trouble usually arises from a mistake on 
the part of both scientists and theologians. Be- 
cause he cannot find the name of God as the 
Maker written plainly on the face of the stars, 
the scientist doubts the existence of an intelli- 
gent Creator. And because he finds the conclu- 
sions of scientific research to be at variance with 
some literal statements of the Bible, the theologian 
denies the plainest propositions and facts of sci- 
ence. The scientist wants to find material proofs 
for spiritual things, or sensuous evidence for that 
which is above the realm of sense; and the theo- 
logian would have spiritual evidence for that which 
is merely natural, or proof from revelation of that 
which is plainly written on the rocks or disclosed 
by the movements of the stars before his eyes. 

Both these classes have a lesson to learn. 
Astronomy and geology and cosmogony are 
taught in the volume of nature, not in the writ- 
ten Word. Immortality and heaven and God are 



12 The Garden of Eden. 

revealed in the Bible, and not in the rocks and 
stars. The scientist need not doubt the Scrip- 
ture, because its natural science is at variance with 
earthly knowledge ; the theologian need not fear 
the progress of science, lest it should overturn 
revelation. The Bible is purely spiritual. Its 
spiritual teachings are in harmony with all true 
science and philosophy ; but in itself, its object, 
and the genuine intent of all its statements, it is 
purely spiritual. Man can gain natural truth by 
the use of his eyes and his natural understanding. 
But he can obtain spiritual truth only by revela- 
tion and that inner consciousness of the verity of 
spiritual things, which intuitively grasps its teach- 
ings when they come before the mind in the form 
of revelation. 

If, then, the Bible in its intent and meaning is 
purely spiritual, v/hy does it profess to give us a 
scientific account of the creation and a historic 
record of the earth's earliest events? The Bible 
does not anywhere profess to teach science, phil- 
osophy, or history as natural things. Its object 
was well expressed by Paul, who commended 
Timothy for his knowledge of the holy Scriptures, 
because they were able to make him wise unto 
salvation, and added: '^All Scripture is given by 
inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, 
or reproof, for correction, for instruction in right- 
eousness ; that the man of God may be perfect, 



The Garden. 13 

thoroughly furnished unto all good works '^ (2 
Tim. iii. 16, It). The Bible professes to teach 
righteousness and salvation, and all truths about 
heaven and God that lead to these. If there is 
more than this it is incidental. 

True, the Bible is replete with the history, 
tradition and laws of the Jews. But then how 
often it is asserted that these are types of spiritual 
things. It recounts, for example, the story of 
the building of the temple ; but our Lord says 
that the temple was a type of his humanity. It 
tells how the wife of Lot looked back to burning 
Sodom, and became a pillar of salt ; but He says 
that this is a type of the fate of those who, 
having put their hand to the plough in religious 
life, look back to the world and self. It repeats 
the tale of Jonah ; but Jonah being three days 
and nights in the belly of the fish, was a type, 
says Christ, of his own entombment and resur- 
rection. It sets forth how Israel was fed in the 
wilderness by manna ; but the story of the manna, 
according to Jesus, shows forth the lesson how 
the Lord will, at all times, feed the spiritual 
Israel, his Church, with goodness and with 
grace. The serpent was lifted up in the wilder- 
ness ; but this was a type of the elevation and 
glorification of the Son of Man. 

These things our Lord plainly says and posi- 
tively sets forth ; and we thence learn that all 
2 



14 The Garden of Eden. 

Biblical history is typical, symbolical, represen- 
tative or correspondential of the Lord, of his 
ways with man, of his work for man's salvation, 
and of human regeneration. 

Paul also tells us much concerning these repre- 
sentations, and gives many explanations of their 
typical nature. We may only refer to the fact 
here, as leading up to and pointing out the truth, 
that whereinsoever the Scripture does not directly 
and in plain language teach spiritual truth, its 
histories and narrations are given as types and 
symbols of spiritual things, as parables or alle- 
gories of spiritual life. This is wherein the 
holiness of Scripture consists. It may use for 
this purpose the history, the traditions, or the 
natural science of the people to whom it was 
first given. Whether these be strictly true or 
not, is a question in no wise pertinent to the 
issue. When Paul asserts, for instance, that 
the life of Abraham and his family as set forth 
in the Biblical narrative, is an allegory (Gal. iv. 
22-31), the question is not whether there is any 
historical error in the account, but whether it is 
perfect as an allegory of spiritual life. And 
when the same apostle declares that the tabernacle 
to the most minute details of its construction, and 
the Levitical law with all its sacrifices, offerings, 
and curious commands, were shadows of heavenly 
things (Heb. vii., viii., ix., x.), it is not the ques- 



The Garden, 15 

tion whether anything was left out of the Mosaic 
narrative, or whether there were inconsistencies 
therein which modern ingenuity fails to harmo- 
nize, but whether they are perfectly expressed 
as types and shadows of good things to come 
in a spiritual way, for men of a later and more 
spiritual age. 

The New Church takes its stand upon this 
ground : that the Scripture of God is given for 
purely spiritual purposes ; that it is written 
throughout as a parable of spiritual things and 
an allegorical code of spiritual instruction, in 
types, sacred figures, or correspondences ; that 
it is mainly true in its historical details, but that, 
as it was not given to teach history or science, 
scientific inaccuracy, or any other objection which 
may be raised on the purely natural plane, no more 
mars its perfection as the inspired Word of God, 
than would it invalidate the spiritual authority 
of the parable of the Prodigal Son, could it be 
incontestably proven that no such individual ever 
lived, behaved riotously, fed swine, repented, or 
returned. 

In this view it is proposed to take up the his- 
tory of the Garden of Eden. This narrative has 
been given as a spiritual allegory. Its construc- 
tion, its peculiarities of diction, and the difficulties 
which surround the assumption that it is the 
record of actual facts set down concerning a 



16 The Garden of Eden. 

historical man and woman, point to it as a spec- 
imen of divine parable, beautiful in its simplicity, 
perfect in its symmetry, harmonious in its state- 
ments. It is of no consequence how inconsistent 
or inaccurate it may be as a historical record ; as 
a parable it is perfect, and that is enough. The 
Divine Mind here as in other parts of the Word, 
seeks to teach not natural but spiritual history ; 
not the outward actions of races, but the inward 
workings of hearts. It treats not of changes of 
locality, but of alterations of state ; not of the 
loss of a natural abode, but of the Torfeiture of a 
spiritual home. The outer husk of the narrative 
is temporal and carnal ; its inward life is moral 
and spiritual. 

The first thought that suggests itself in the 
consideration of this topic, is in reference to the 
etymology of the word '' Eden.'' It is a Hebrew 
expression signifying delight or happiness. And 
when we consider that the term garden is often 
applied in the Scripture to man's state of spiritual 
intelligence, or to that frame of mind in which he 
readily comprehends and accepts spiritual things, 
that this peculiar state of mind is alluded to as a 
garden, likened to a garden, called a garden, we 
have no trouble in arriving at the truth that the 
Garden of Eden was man's spiritually intelligent 
state of love and happiness in the early age of 
the world. • For was it not said in reference to 



The Garden. 17 

the Jews, spiritually unfertile and dry as their 
religious state was, '' Ye shall be as an oak whose 
leaf fadeth, and as a garden that hath no water '' 
(Isa. i. 8) ? — that is, as an intelligent mind not 
fertilized by any conception of spiritual truth? 
And when the restoration of the Church was 
foretold, and its promised fertile and fruitful 
condition set forth in glowing figures, was it not 
said by the Lord, ^' Thou shalt be like a watered 
garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters 
fail not '' (Isa. Iviii. 11) ? 

Eden is also mentioned in other parts of Scrip- 
ture. It is generally used, however, in reference 
to a spiritual condition, and not as a place. Thus 
the Lord, through Ezekiel, rebukes the prince of 
Tyre for his arrogance, and for his assumption 
of the honors of divine worship. He holds up 
before him the perfectness of his walk with God 
until iniquity lay hold upon him ; and how much 
lower would be his fall, because, having been once 
perfect, he has now, in his pride, proclaimed him- 
self a god. In reference to his first state the Lord 
says, *'^ Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of 
God" (Ez. xxviii. 13). Now the prince of Tyre 
had never been in any literal garden called Eden. 
But he had followed the Lord ; he had loved and 
worshiped Him ; he had feasted on spiritual in- 
telligence ; he had been, spiritually speaking*, in 
Eden, the garden of God. Eden was his religious 
2^ B 



18 The Garden of Eden. 

state ; it was his state of love for God ; it was, 
if you please, the kingdom of God in which he 
once had dwelt — not locally, but as to mind and 
heart. 

This same figure is used by the Lord in speak- 
ing of Assyria, as again given in the prophet 
Ezekiel. He extols the Assyrian for what he 
had been, as a people, and condemns him for 
what he then was. Depicting, in the language 
of correspondence, his former high spiritual 
estate. He says ; ^' Behold the Assyrian was a 
cedar in Lebanon with fair branches and of high 
stature. Not any tree in the garden of God was 
like unto him in beauty. I have made him fair 
by the multitude of his branches ; so that all the 
trees of Eden that were in the garden of God 
envied him " (Ez. xxxi. 3, 8, 9). The whole 
description, and much more too voluminous to 
quote, is purely symbolic. The cedar tree is 
the Assyrian man or mind, with its peculiarly 
rational tone as it was in its highest and best 
religious state. The trees of Eden are those 
men or minds who were in the love of the Lord ; 
and the garden of God in which they were planted, 
is that state of spiritual intelligence in which are 
all who love the Lord, his ways, his truths, and 
his life. And therefore it is that Isaiah, in proph- 
esying concerning the future spiritual condition 
of the Church, declares that the Lord ^' will make 



The Garden. • 19 

her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the 
garden of the Lord ; joy and gladness shall be 
found therein, thanksgiving and the voice of 
melody " (li. 3). How beautiful a description 
of the wonderful change that shall transform 
the religious wilderness of Judaism into the 
Eden of Christianity — the desert of religious 
ignorance into the garden of spiritual intelli- 
gence ! 

He who attains this state of superabounding 
love, is in Eden ; he who can see spiritual truth 
as clearly as he understands natural truth, is in 
the Lord^s garden. Eden, as a sacred symbol, is 
love, with all the blessings that follow in its train ; 
a garden, as a sacred symbol, is spiritual intelli- 
gence, with all the joys that follow its possession. 
And our early ancestors — no matter where they 
lived, nor by the side of what rivers, nor in what 
meridian, clime or zone — were in the Garden of 
Eden ; not because they were here or there, but 
because they were in a state of love and inno- 
cence and joy and bliss that no tongue can ex- 
press ; because they were in a state of conscious- 
ness of the Lord's presence, of comprehension of 
the things of divine wisdom, and of conception 
of all that pertains to eternal life and its joys, 
of which none but dwellers in that garden can 
form the least idea. Perhaps they were simple 
in what we call worldly ways ; illiterate in what 



20 The Garden of Eden. 

we term letters ; without the luxuries which we 
have learned to love ; and innocent of the very- 
knowledge of evil ; good in all the Lord calls 
good, and wise in the wisdom of holy life, beyond 
all that this world, as it now is, can imagine. 

But was not Adam a single individual ? Care- 
ful consideration does not so read the Scripture. 
Adam is the Hebrew term for man ; not man a 
male individual, for there is another Hebrew 
word for that ; but man collectively as a class or 
race. Adam means mankind. It could not mean 
an individual, for in the original it is a collective 
noun. True, the translators of the Bible, having 
imbibed the old tradition of Adam as the sole 
progenitor of the human race, have sometimes 
translated it as though it were the name of an 
individual. But they have been compelled in 
other places to give the real meaning, or spoil 
the sense of the text. Thus, when it is said in 
the first chapter of Genesis, ''And God said. Let 
us make man in our image, after our likeness '^ 
(Gen. i. 26), the original Hebrew word is Adam. 
But it would not do to translate it Adam there, 
as the name of an individual, because the text 
proceeds thus : ''And let them have dominion 
over the fish of the sea," etc. And the next 
verse continues in the same strain : '' So God 
created man,'' literally, ''God created Adam, in 
his own image, in the image of God created He 



The Garden. 21 

him ; male and female created He them. And 
God blessed them ; and God said unto them, Be 
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth and 
subdue it.'^ 

Adam, then, is a collective noun. Adam was 
created male and female ; and there were a num- 
ber of them, for the term them certainly means 
more than one. Adam was the primitive race. 
He was placed in Eden, not as a single man in a 
solitary garden, but as a race of men originally 
brought into the kingdom of God. His state or 
condition was called Eden, because he was loving 
and therefore happy ; a garden, because he was 
truly intelligent and spiritually wise. Adam 
(that is, the human race) would be in Eden to- 
day, if all men loved the Lord supremely, and 
perceived and appreciated the heavenly intelli- 
gence with which their Maker seeks to endow 
them. 

The history of Eden is, therefore, an account, 
in allegorical form, of the spiritual condition of 
the early inhabitants of earth. Each word in 
the narrative is a symbol, and a perfect one. 
Inconsistencies in the letter disappear when 
their spiritual meaning is discerned. 

Briefly let us glance at a few of the attributes 
of this wonderful garden. It was planted east- 
ward in Eden. In sacred symbolism the east is 
where the Lord is. Spiritually, we are looking 



22 The Garden of Eden. 

eastward when we look to Him. The garden 
was, therefore, said to be planted eastward in 
Eden, because the religion of those people all 
centered in the Lord. Their love, their innocence, 
their joy and gladness were recognized as from 
the Lord, were rejoiced in as the Lord's, were 
manifested as the Lord's life flowing through 
them. The garden, therefore — their spiritual 
wisdom and intelligence — was planted in Eden, 
their love and spiritual joy, eastward, in the full 
consciousness of their possessing both from the 
Lord and in his presence. ''And out of the 
ground made the Lord God to grow every tree 
that is pleasant to the sight and good for food." 

Our Lord very often, when on earth, likened 
the ground to the mind. It is another sacred 
symbol. When He likened himself to a sower 
sowing the seeds of Gospel truth, the shallow 
soil was the shallow mind, the stony ground 
was the callous mind impervious to spiritual 
.ideas, the good ground was the fruitful mind. 
The ground here out of which the trees grew, 
was the ground of the mind. The trees are the 
mind's perceptions. Sometimes this word is 
used for the man himself or the mind itself; 
but it really means the mind's religious percep- 
tions. '' Every tree that bringeth forth good 
fruit " of which our Lord spake, means not only 
every man or every mind, but specifically every 



The Garden. 23 

perception of true life which the mind has, that 
goes forth into good life, or bears spiritual fruit. 
So all perceptions of the true, which sprang forth 
in the ground of the minds of those people, which 
could be pleasant to the sight (mental sight is the 
understanding ; pleasant to the sight, is agreeable 
to the understanding) or good for food — good, that 
is, for spiritual nourishment — were given by the 
Lord to a people so loving and so true. 

The river that went out of Eden to water the 
garden, is a curious expression. How, literally, 
could the river go out of Eden to water the 
garden, if, literally, Eden was the garden ? N'at- 
urally, it could not ; spiritually, it could. The 
river is the symbol of wisdom considered as flow- 
ing into the mind from the fountain of wisdom, 
God. It v^ould be pleasant to trace this beautiful 
symbol through its many phases in the Word. 
Suffice it here to allude to the river of water of 
life, which in the Revelation is described as pro- 
ceeding out of the throne of God and the Lamb. 
The river of Eden and the river of the New 
Jerusalem are one. The spirit of wisdom, its 
fountain-head being the Lord, proceeds from the 
love of spiritual things within the mind, and the 
delight in pursuing them. Without a love for it 
and a delight in its pursuit, there is no wisdom 
of any kind. Hence the river went forth from 
Eden — wisdom springing from love and its de- 



24 The Garden of Men. 

light. And it went forth to water the garden, 
or to give life and vigor to human intelligence. 

And this river is said to have parted into four 
heads, and to have watered four regions, Havilah, 
Ethiopia, Assyria and the land of the Euphrates, 
— not because any literal rivers went forth to 
water natural lands, but because the mind has 
four regions to be influenced by reason and to be 
guided by intelligence. These are the will, the 
understanding, the rationality and the memory. 
They are spiritual lands — lands of the mind and 
not of matter ; and the names of those particular 
countries are so applied, because they afterwards 
became sacred symbols in accordance with the 
predominating genius of their people, and in that 
sense are elsewhere used in the Scriptures. 

So geographers may give up their disputes in 
the effort to find impossible rivers watering impos- 
sible lands and flowing from an impossible Eden ; 
for Eden is in all places where man is of heavenly 
mould, and its garden and trees and rivers are 
simply descriptive, in ancient symbolism, of the 
minds and hearts of a people beloved of the Lord. 
Even the gold of Haviiah they may cease to 
search for, as we are told in the text that the gold 
of that land was good. For Havilah was the 
land of the will ; and goodness — good thoughts, 
good desires and good deeds — was the golden will 
of those celestial people who lived in olden times. 



The Garden, 25 

To this era, all tradition points. From Egypt, 
India, Greece and Rome, the oracles of the an- 
cient chronicles tell us in glowing syllables of the 
Golden Age. It was the world^s young morn of 
happy innocence. Why is it set forth in Scrip- 
ture ? To teach the Church what it has been, 
and what it may again become. That which has 
been, may be. That which has once been lost, 
may once again be found. And the life that man 
has lived, may be lived by man again. We may 
all dwell in Eden ; and the narrative of the garden 
of spiritual joy, stands as a hope, a promise, a 
spiritual prophecy of what may again be realized 
here on earth. 

May the time speed on when Christianity 
shall find its Eden once more, where the sole 
delight shall be — with love that shall never weary 
and wisdom that will not die — to dress and keep, 
in its eternal beauty, that sacred garden of the 
Lord ! 
3 




II. 



THE TWO TREES. 

And out of the ground made the Lord God 
to grow every tret that is pleasant to the 
sight, and good for food; the tree of life 
also in the midst of the garden, and the tree 
of knowledge of good and evil.— Gen. ii. 9. 

^^^HE very first principle in our consideration 
fe^'^ of whatever relates to the Garden of Eden, 
^■^k2Jt lies in the truth that it is a state and not a 
place ; that the entire narrative is an allegory, 
and not a literal history. Eden is in the heart. 
The garden is of the mind. The second chapter 
of Genesis describes not a natural occurrence 
which took place in a particular earthly locality, 
but the spiritual condition of the most ancient 
Church. Adam means not one individual, but all 
mankind. The garden was a symbol of the intelli- 
gence in which they lived ; Eden, of the sphere of 
love and joy amid which they moved. And Adam 
in the Garden of Eden, is an allegory of the state 
of love, happiness and spiritual intelligence in 
which the Lord placed the early fathers of the 
human race. This was the lesson we drew from 
the text in our last discourse. This is the plain 
inference to be deduced from what the Scripture 
elsewhere affirms of its own method of interpreta- 

26 



The Two Trees. 27 

tion ; from what the LorcPs Word elsewhere testi- 
fies concerning Eden and the garden that bore its 
name. 

This method of calling certain conditions of life 
or states of mind by, as it were, local names, is a 
characteristic of all Scripture, and has been fol- 
lowed by the poets of all time as peculiarly beau- 
tiful and expressive. A verse in Moore's Lalla 
Rookh, illustrates this poetic peculiarity, borrowed 
from the age of symbolism. 

^' There 's a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told, 

When two, that are linked in one heav'nly tie, 
With heart never changing and brow never cold, 

Love on through all ills and love on till they die. 
One hour of a passion so sacred, is worth 

Whole ages of heartless and wandering bliss ; 
And, oh ! if there he an Elysium on earth, 

It is this, it is this.'^ 

How the force of this passage would be destroyed 
were we to imagine Elysium as used here, to be 
a particular province or town in which all young 
lovers dwelt. It is descriptive, on the contrary, 
of a state of love and bliss. But should we sub- 
stitute, in place of the idea of a sentimental pas- 
sion between two young hearts, that of a condition 
of perfect love to the Lord, with all the joy, peace 
and innocence with which that state is so closely 
bound, and close a couplet poetically descriptive 
thereof with the exclamation, 



28 The Garden of Eden. 

"And, oh ! if there be an Eden on earth, 
It is this, it is this," 

we would get the precise idea of the manner in 
which Eden is to be understood in Scripture. 
This is a conception that must be thoroughly 
imbedded in our minds and naturalized to our 
thoughts, if we would read this portion of the 
Bible aright. So thinking and so intuitively 
grasping the spirit of the narrative, we are pre- 
pared to follow its details to their legitimate con- 
clusion. 

Now in this view it becomes evident that, as 
Eden is not a place nor the garden a locality, the 
two trees which play so important a part in the 
narrative must be something other than their 
literal import would indicate. If the Garden of 
Eden is a phrase indicative of the state of the 
people of the Lord's first Church on earth, these 
trees must, in some way, be further descriptive 
of that state. Their very names indicate this. 
A tree of life — a natural tree that would bear 
fruit, the eating whereof would render our ex- 
istence on earth one of endless duration — is a 
thing that we cannot comprehend. To suppose 
that any natural fruit could nourish our souls 
to eternal life, in the higher spiritual meaning 
of that term, would tax our credulity still more 
largely. But as this garden is of the mind, to 
find some mental attributes of which these trees 



The Two Trees. 29 

are symbolic, or to which they correspond, were 
not so very difficult. 

That in ancient times the tree of life was used 
in a figurative sense, is evident from the manner 
in which it was employed by Solomon. Thus he 
says in his Proverbs, ''Happy is the man that 
findeth wisdom ; . . . she is a tree of life to 
them that lay hold upon her ; and happy is every 
one that retaineth her '^ (iii. 13, 18). And again, 
'' Hope deferred maketh the heart sick ; but when 
the desire cometh, it is a tree of life '' (lb. xiii. 12). 
The wise man, in accordance with the usage of 
his day derived from a higher antiquity, applied 
this term to anything that gave new life or vigor 
to understanding, heart, thought or desire. A 
tree of life was that, whatever it might be, from 
which mental or moral life refreshed or renewed 
itself. We have no warrant for believing that the 
term in olden times was ever thought of except 
as a symbol. Certainly all references to it in the 
Bible disagree with the literal idea and sustain 
the figurative. But this use of the term, as seen 
in the quotations from Solomon, was on a some- 
what lower plane than that in which the Lord uses 
it in the books He has given in his own name. 
What He says, while it has a mental and moral, 
has also a spiritual import. The whole Word of 
God in its inward meanings, announces spiritual 

truths. 

3* 



30 The Garden of Eden. 

This meaning may be gathered from the book 
of Revelation. Here it is our Lord who com- 
mands John to write, and who dictates what he 
shall write ; and the words convey strictly divine 
meanings in all their forms of expression. And 
He commands this to be written to the Church 
of Ephesus: '' I'o him that overcometh will I 
give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the 
midst of the paradise of God " (Rev. ii. 7). 
Here the tree of life clearly indicates something 
high and holy. He that is entitled to partake of 
this tree, is he that has overcome. Overcome 
what? Why, the flesh and the world, self and 
sensuality, pride and passion ; who has, in fact, 
trodden under foot everything, of whatever nature 
or description, which impedes the perfect life — sin 
in act, in thought, in desire. He who does this, 
is he who lives in love of the Lord ; who lives in 
the Lord and from the Lord ; who has the Lord's 
life inscribed on the very nerves and tissues of his 
spirit. Such an one is a living embodiment of 
God's law and love. He knows that it is he who 
hath the Lord's commandments and doeth them, 
that loveth Him. And He has and does, and 
therefore loves. 

We use this term love a great deal. What 
does it mean ? It means that the love or affec- 
tion from which a person does his daily work, not 
only tinges the whole character, but gives color 



The Two Trees. 31 

and quality to the entire life. As Swedenborg 
expresses it, ^' Love is the life of man." One 
may do a good act from a bad love. He may live 
an outwardly good life from inwardly bad motives. 
He may be gentle and kind and give freely to 
charitable purposes, and be honest in business, 
and say many prayers, because he seeks honor 
and praise from men. He may do many good 
things from the love of approbation, or from the 
love of advancement, or from the love of money, 
or from any other selfish love. Now a good act 
done from an unworthy love, so far as the man is 
concerned, is spurious. The love from which he 
speaks or acts, stamps the character of the word 
or deed, rendering it good or bad according to the 
quality of the love. 

But when our Lord said : '' If ye love me, keep 
my commandments ;" and '^ he that hath my com- 
mandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth 
me,'' He told the whole story of love to God, and 
gave the expression its true definition. The Lord's 
commandments teach the pure and perfect life. 
They are instinct with honesty, sincerity, truth- 
fulness, generosity, unselfishness, purity, spiritu- 
ality. They ignore base and low motives ; they 
exalt that which is noble and lovely. They do 
not debar us from all sensual gratification, but 
they place sense and self under the absolute con- 
trol of the spiritual faculties. Love to the Lord 



32 The Garden of Eden. 

is love of all things good and true, because these 
constitute his very Self. He taught us this kind 
of life in a thousand precepts, and commanded us 
to keep them. If we love the Lord's teachings, 
we love Him. If we love his commandments and 
practice them in our daily lives, we love Him. 
If we love his character and example, we love 
Him. If we love to have his spirit in the heart 
as a prompting motive in all we speak and do, we 
love Him. 

Love to the Lord is good as a sentimental emo- 
tion : but if it is nothing more, it is comparatively 
Avorthless. In truth it is a very practical thing. 
It is something that lives in the life, gives tone to 
the character, buys and sells, works in the hands, 
renders the muscles vigorous, energizes the facul- 
ties, imparts truthfulness to prayer and sincerity 
to worship. When love to the Lord is the prin- 
ciple from which we live and work, then life is 
genuine. We live righteously because from the 
love of right, and do good works from the love 
of good. God is righteousness itself — goodness 
itself ; and he who loves the right and the good 
for their own sake, loves God — loves Him who 
infills the soul with their spirit. If all men had 
this spirit, the world would again be an Eden, 
and all w^ould be living on the fruit of the tree 
of life. For Eden, as we have learned, is this 
state of love ; but the tree of life is that love as 



The Tiro Trees. 33 

the very life of the heart. Eden is the state of 
peace, innocence and joy with which the soul is 
suffused, and which it carries with it in all the 
circumstances and vicissitudes of life, in all its 
labors and burdens, in all its duties and amuse- 
ments. But the tree of life is that love as the 
fountain within the heart whence spring the spirit 
of goodness and purity of motive which give the 
life this state and tone. 

The tree of life ! Love to God ! Let us under- 
stand this fully. Is not the Lord as a sun to the 
spirit ? Does not the Scripture tell us this dis- 
tinctly ? Flows He not in with an influence on 
mind and heart, with the spirit of understanding 
and the warmth of love, in a manner similar to 
that in which the natural sun operates upon the 
earth with his light and heat ? Do we not speak 
of the light of truth and the warmth of love as 
real things ? Yea, the Lord, as the central Sun 
of the world of spirit and mind, flows in with 
his li^t into the understanding and with his 
love into the will. Then when it is said, ^^ The 
Lord God is a sun and shield ; the Lord will give 
grace and glory,'' we cling to the sentiment in no 
merely metaphorical sense ; we recognize the un- 
seen Divinity as the fountain whence pour, as 
real things, the grace of love into the heart and 
the glory of spiritual wisdom into the under- 
standing. 



34 The Garden of Eden. 

If, then, love is an implantation of the Lord's 
own spirit within the heart — true love, I mean — 
we see what a glorious tree of life it is as it takes 
root in the ground of the spirit, grows in vigor 
and expands in strength, until the whole life feeds 
upon its fruit and nourishes itself with its invig- 
orating juices. For ''out of the ground," it is 
said, made the Lord God to grow these -trees ; 
and out of the ground of man's spirit is it, that 
the tree of life and its opposite spring forth. 

It is noteworthy that this tree of life whereof 
the xipostle John wrote to the Ephesian Church, 
and of which it is declared that he who over- 
cometh shall eat, is said to be ''in the midst of 
the Paradise of God.'' Paradise is Eden. In 
the midst of Paradise, is in the center of the 
heart. Observe, it is not spoken of here as a 
matter of the past — not as a thing of six thou- 
sand years ago — but is predicated of the present 
and future. The Ephesians were after Christ's 
time. Had Eden been a locality of earlie^ geog- 
raphy, no Ephesian could ever have been there. 
Literally viewed, Eden has gone into oblivion 
forever; it is obliterated from the face of the 
earth ; and the tree of life exists no more. But 
Eden, or the tree of life in its midst, was prom- 
ised to an Asiatic Church. Eden is in every 
heart that overcometh ; and he that overcometh, 
to-day and forever, is in Paradise, the Eden of 



The Two Trees. 35 

God. And he eats of the tree of life nutriment — 
or in other words, he draws his spiritual, his dis- 
interested, heavenly life — from the love of the 
Lord planted in the midst of the garden of his 
mind. It is not from Paine or Yoltaire or Inger- 
soll that he draws the nourishment which feeds 
his mind and invigorates his heart ; from such 
sources he gathers the food of doubt or denial of 
religion and its God. It is not from the world 
and its mean morality or sensuous pleasure ; not 
from self with its soul-seducing conclusions, and 
cold, hard, iron logic, that he gathers the nutri- 
ment for his spirit's life ; but it is from the love 
of God and goodness, and the Word of God which 
reveals them. The purity, the sweetness, -the in- 
nocence, the unselfishness of the life which the 
Lord commands and gives, are so grateful to his 
obedient heart and receptive thought and willing 
hand, that he will have no other fruit to appro- 
priate to the life of his soul. 

That is to say, it is not in the garden of doubt, 
nor in that of denial, nor in that of merely sen- 
suous thought, that he truly lives ; not in the 
garden of worldliness or selfishness or mere sen- 
suous pleasure that he dwells ; but it is in Eden, 
the Paradise of God, the garden of love, with its 
intelligence and joy. And he eats not, nor nour- 
ishes his soul with the fruit, of any tree that 
teaches or produces or strengthens a denial of the 



36 The Garden of Eden. 

Lord, or an unwise or unholy life ; but he sets up 
the love of the Lord within his heart, or rather 
permits the Lord to plant it there, as the source 
of all true life and holy joy and serene peace — 
of all truth, wisdom, and intelligence. It is of 
the fruit of this tree that he eats, and eating lives 
forever. Not that his material body will live for 
ages unending on this earthly ball ; but his soul, 
wherever it works, whether in this world or the 
world to come, will possess that divine gift which 
can never be taken away, and which, in the lan- 
guage of the Lord, is known as eternal life. 

Thus ate the Eden dwellers of old, and thus had 
they life. Thus may we eat and live ; and all 
mankind may dwell again in Eden if they will. 
For at almost the very close of the holy Word, 
with well-nigh the last written utterance our Lord 
vouchsafes to man. He declares: ''Blessed are 
they that do his commandments, that they may 
have right to the tree of life '' (Rev. xxii. 14). 

So we know that the tree of life is love ; that 
when it is said it grows in the midst of the Para- 
dise of God, it means in the center of the soul ; 
that we eat of it by appropriating it in will and 
thought and act ; or in other words, by obeying 
the Lord's commands ; that so did they who lived 
in the first Church which the Lord planted on 
earth, and called by the name Adam ; and that 



The Two Trees. 37 

we like them, so far as we love the Lord and live 
in and from Him, shall dwell in Eden too. 

And now, ye who honestly doubt the Bible as the 
Word of God, because this narrative in Genesis 
is inconsistent as literal history, are you not mis- 
taken in your criticism ? Is not this which I 
have briefly set forth, the real meaning of Eden 
and its tree, view^ed in the light of other portions 
of the sacred Volume ? 

But there was another tree which grew in this 
wonderful garden, and it was called the tree of the 
knowledge of good and evil. 

There is no mention of this by name in any 
other portion of the Scripture. But when we 
come to understand the nature of the tree of life, 
can we doubt concerning this? Whatever the 
one is, the other is evidently its opposite. And 
if we have dwelt long and critically upon the 
nature of the one, it is not time w^asted ; for we 
have but to turn our backs upon the tree of life 
and look the other way, to behold that of the 
knowledge of good and evil. To eat of the tree 
of life, was to live from the Lord and heavenly 
love. To eat of the forbidden tree, was to live 
from self-love and the self-intelligence thence de- 
rived. The tree of life grew heavenly fruit ; the 
tree of knowledge infernal fruit. The tree of 
love gave clear perception of what was good and 
true ; the tree of knowledge filled the soul with 
4 



38 The Garden of Eden. 

the evil and false. The tree of life was the way 
to eternal life; the tree of knowledge was the 
path to spiritual death. 

We observed in the former discourse that trees 
symbolize perceptions of the mind. The different 
kinds of trees are symbolic of the different phases 
of perception. The tree of life, therefore, to use 
a more definite phrase, was love perceived as the 
very life of the soul. It embodied the idea of a 
keen perception, on the part of the Eden dwellers, 
of the fact that the Lord constantly flows into them 
with his love, as the sun flows to earth with its 
warmth ; that thence the tree of life sprung up in 
their inmost hearts as the governing principle of 
their existence ; and that, therefore, they lived 
and loved, and were wise and intelligent, and 
thought and spoke, really from the Lord. The 
tree of life was then love as a conscious percep- 
tion of the Lord in their own lives. Under this 
perception there could be but one result. Spir- 
itual truth would be as clear to them as the sun 
in its shining. As it is sufficient to say that hon- 
esty is right and truthfulness to be commended, 
for one to see intuitively that it is so, with them 
any truth of a spiritual nature, such as the im- 
mortality of the soul, the existence of God, his 
goodness, his merc}^, his eternal providence, the 
life of absolute trust in Him, the belief that all 
his ways are right — these and all other true spir- 



The Tioo Trees. 39 

itual enunciations would be received without a 
doubt or question, and perceived intuitively. This 
is the highest faith known. It is the only testi- 
mony which admits of no discussion. When man 
loves God above all things, this faith is his. It is 
ours so far as we are in Eden, no further. Love 
perceived as the wisdom of life, and perceived as 
implanted by the Lord for that purpose, is the 
tree of life. With this planted in the soul, all 
argument is ended. We know because w^e love. 

Now the tree of knowledge would be the exact 
opposite of this. It would begin to grow vigor- 
ously just so far as we desired to be in our own self- 
intelligence. The pride of one's own intelligence 
is a terrible thing. The desire to feel that one is 
one's own and not the Lord's, the vanity that 
would say, This truth I reasoned out myself; the 
pride that would claim that the integrity I possess 
is my own, and that the merit of my good deeds 
belongs to me ; the self-sufficiency that asserts 
one's self as the origin and center of what he is 
and feels and acquires, is the tree of knowledge 
sending its roots down deep within the spirit. It 
first separates its life from God's life ; then it 
claims the merit of its goodness and understand- 
ing ; then it denies God and makes self the center, 
circumference, and all in all of its own little world. 
It loses its perception of love to the Lord as the 
controlling element of its nature ; it loses sight of 



40 The Garden of Eden. 

the Lord ; it departs from his spiritual wisdom of 
which it has lost the inward evidence ; it tries to 
confirm, by sensuous evidence and natural science, 
that which is above the realm of sense and sci- 
ence ; consequently it learns to deny that, the 
evidence of which it has lost the capacity to weigh 
or understand. 

Now, as the tree of life was the Lord who is 
love, perceived as the life principle of the soul, 
and as a consequence, spiritual wisdom in its 
broadest sense intuitively perceived, the tree of 
knowledge was self and the consequent self- 
derived intelligence perceived as the all in all of 
life, and sensuous evidence and natural science the 
arbiter of spiritual things. Is it strange that the 
Lord should commend the one and forbid the 
other ? The one in his eyes was life, the other 
death. The one was purity, the other passion. 
The one was love, the other lust. The one was 
wisdom, the other insanity. The one was hu- 
mility, the other pride. The one grasped all 
humanity in its loving arms, the other centered 
the entire universe in self. The one shot its 
branches ever upward to heaven, the other sent 
its roots down deep into hell. That was Avhy the 
eating of all the trees of the garden was com- 
mended, save only this. 

The reason why it is called the tree of knowl- 
edge of good and evil, is because in eating of 



The Two Trees, 41 

this tree man comes into a practical knowledge 
of the distinction between the two. Previously 
he lived the good. Evil to him was only disobe- 
dience, a mere name for an unknown quantity, a 
something of which he had no experimental knowl- 
edge. The good was more a life than knowledge ; 
the evil was neither — was nothing. But tasting 
of evil, then both the good and the evil came into 
his experience as a knowledge, as things to be 
talked over and compared. Good was no longer 
a life, but a remembrance ; evil was no longer an 
unknown quantity, but an experience. 

And now, why did the Lord plant the two trees 
in Eden ? Why not the tree of life only ? Why 
was man placed in the way of temptation ? 

The whole lesson is the doctrine of human free- 
dom, taught in allegory and applied to the most 
ancient Church. To put the lesson in other words, 
the tree of life was obedience to the law of love, 
the tree of knowledge was disobedience to its 
divine behests. To love the Lord was life, to 
depart from that love was spiritual death. Xow 
w^hat intrinsic good is there in obedience, if there 
is no power to disobey ? Do the locks and bolts 
and bars of our prisons indicate purity of heart ? 
Is not he rather the good man who, walking free 
his way on earth, chooses the good and refrains 
from evil ? Would divine bars be any better ? 
Had He said to man, '' You shall not sin ; I will 
4- 



42 The Garden of Eden. 

take from you the power of sin,'' would that have 
made a perfect man, when true purity is the vol- 
untary choice of good ? The ox, the lamb and 
the dove have their gentle natures, but they are 
beasts and birds. Man is man by virtue of his 
freedom. He is no brute to live and die without 
choice or reason. Freedom to obey, involves the 
power to disobey. Freedom of determination is 
the highest gift to created intelligence ; and it 
implies the noblest qualities, the greatest happi- 
ness and the grandest good the Lord can give; 
and God could not have made his noblest creature 
— man, with an angel's destiny — and denied him 
that which lifts him above the brute and makes 
him man, the noble gift of freedom. 

Therefore the power of obedience implies the 
power of disobedience. We have it, and none 
can deny the fact. If we had it not, the punish- 
ment of crime would be itself a crime. That we 
justify our courts and penitentiaries, is a confes- 
sion of our belief in the moral freedom of man. 
When, therefore, the Lord commanded man to 
obey his law of love, and gave him the power to 
obey, the power to disobey w^as clearly involved 
in it ; and He had either to plant both trees in 
the ground of his mind, or none. He had either 
to make him man or make him brute. 

It is for man wisely to use this gift of freedom. 
It is for him to love and live, not to center his 



The Two Trees. 



43 



soul on self and die. We are inheritors of this 
destiny. Let us heed the lesson well, ponder its 
great privileges, appreciate its divine excellence, 
admire its tribute to our heaven-born powers, 
cling to the tree of life, and win the Eden which 
awaits all open, receptive and obedient souls. 





III. 

THE WOMAN. 

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall 
upon Adam, and he dc.pt; and he took one 
of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead 
thereof And the rib, which the Lord God 
had taken from m'<n, made he a woman, 
and brought her unto the man. — Gen. ii. 
21, 22. 

,E have arrived in the two previous dis- 
courses at certain definite conclusions, 
based upon reason and proved by Scrip- 
ture. Among these are the conclusion that the 
narrative of the Garden of Eden is not a literal 
history but an allegory ; that Adam is not the 
name of an individual, but a Hebrew term signi- 
fying man, or mankind in general, including both 
sexes ; that the Garden of Eden was not a para- 
dise of visible groves, lawns and flowers, but the 
state of love, innocence, spiritual intelligence and 
delight in which the people of the world's young 
morning dwelt ; that the tree of life was not a 
vegetable production planted in the geometrical 
center of a literal garden from whence man drew 
his natural support, with ability to exist on earth 
forever, but was love or the Lord as the control- 
ling element of the mind, with a perception that 
all life is from Him ; that the tree of knowledge 
was not a natural tree which bore material fruit, 

44 



The Woman. 45 

the eating whereof brought sorrow, pain and 
death into the world, but was self-intelligent and 
sensuous life, with a perception of self as the only 
source of existence and the only thing to live for ; 
that the eating from one or the other of these, 
was not the act of partaking of natural fruit, but 
was the drawing of the soul's spiritual sustenance 
from love of God or love of self; and that the 
command in relation to the fruit of these two 
trees, was not a precept concerning what the first 
man ought or ought not to have eaten as healthful 
natural food, but taught, in the language of cor- 
respondence, a lesson setting forth that law of 
freedom which was planted from the first in human 
souls, whereby man had the power of choosing to 
live from the Lord and inherit eternal life, or to 
live from sense and self in disobedience of God's 
command. 

History furnishes no account of the man of this 
Golden Age. The traditions, however, of many 
races as well as sacred books unerringly point to it ; 
mythology throws a glowing radiance of arcadian 
beauty around its life of simple tastes and quiet 
happiness; and revelation depicts its loves and 
joys in divine types and correspondences. And 
so we are taught that the man of this early age 
was the very embodiment of innocence and purity, 
with a meekness and humility truly angelic, bask- 
ing in the very sunshine of the Lord's love. He 



46 The Garden of Eden. 

could never, it is true, have coped with the world 
as it is to-day. To place such a man in our pres- 
ent world, would be almost like placing a lamb in 
the midst of wolves. Ignorant, as the world now 
would deem, he unquestionably was. Science 
and art, learning and skill, luxury and extrava- 
gance, as they permeate all present life, were to 
him unknown. Without doubt nature was beau- 
tiful, and the bounteous soil with its spontaneous 
products supplied his simple wants. It was not 
necessary for him to be lashed to his daily round 
of duty by the whip of necessity, nor to work in 
repulsive fields of labor under the spur of want. 
Earth w^as sparsely peopled, and fruitful nature 
furnished food for all. 

But ignorant as he was in worldly things, the 
now hidden mysteries of God and godly conversa- 
tion, of heaven and heavenly life, made him wise 
in a wisdom far above that of to-day. His life 
was a round of spiritual offices to those about him ; 
his children were reared as heirs, not of the 
world's wealth and applause, but of spiritual 
riches and the approval of the Lord. It was in- 
deed the childhood of the race ; and those people 
of the past were very children of the Lord, inno- 
cent, beautiful, guileless, angelic. Godlike, but un- 
learned in the follies which the world prizes and 
pursues now, unskilled in all the cunning of to-day. 

We know that mankind did not remain in that 



The Woman. 47 

innocent state. The history of the past — so far 
back as human chronicles extend — is little more 
than a record of crime ; and the struggles of the 
present are but efforts to rise from the moral mire 
into which the world is plunged. So there has 
been a great change. Celestial innocence has 
given place to selfishness and sensuality. This 
decadence occurred in prehistoric times. No 
earthly chronicler has left us the record of its 
progress. It could not have been sudden. Great 
and rapid moral changes are contrary to all ex- 
perience. Nations decay by successive steps 
which run through centuries. Egypt, Athens, 
Sparta, Rome, sunk to effeminacy, indolence, 
crime and final destruction, by gradual departures, 
each so small that it was difficult to mark its 
separate existence ; and their decline was so slow 
as to make their complete decadence the work of 
a hundred or a thousand years. 

So was it, probably, that the most ancient peo- 
ple fell. So we read the allegory as set forth in 
the second and third chapters of Genesis. There 
was a first step, a second, and — a thousandth. 
There were also general steps measured by marked 
peculiarities of retrogression. It was the depart- 
ure from rectitude of a race, and not that of an 
individual. That Church of innocence and peace 
may have lasted many centuries ; how many we 
cannot tell. From that blissful state to its declen- 



48 The Garden of Eden, 

sion and final fall, probably was a period of many 
centuries more. 

The first departure from perfect innocence must 
have been very slight. Such first departures al- 
ways are. They begin in things so small that we 
do not see the evil in them. The first slight in- 
clination is the preliminary step to a drunkard's 
grave ; the first boyish cheat at marbles, the small 
beginning that leads to the forger's cell ; the first 
fruit surreptitiously obtained from the mother's 
pantry, the trivial ofi'ense that may end in highway 
robbery. It is plain to perceive the nature of 
the first mistake of these primitive children of 
God ; plain, not because it is so on the face of the 
literal narrative, but because the symbols by which 
it is related make it so. 

Up to this time the description is that of the 
Garden of Eden as it was originally created by 
the Lord. All that from a spiritual point of view 
is lovely and lofty, is represented in the corre- 
spondences employed. By them we determine 
the character of the people whom they describe. 
But something new is introduced into Eden now 
— a feature which was not there when that garden 
was first planted ; which was not there when man 
was put into the garden thus divinely formed. The 
woman is introduced upon the scene. 

If Eden symbolizes man's state of love, the 
garden his intelligence, the tree of life the Lord 



The Woman. 49 

and his love perceived as the soul's inmost life, 
the tree of knowledge, the life of self and sense 
forbidden and as yet unknown, the woman mast 
be symbolic also. What was her spiritual mean- 
ing, and what the part she bore in this history 
of a celestial state and its final loss ? For ^ve 
must remember that Adam w^as a people, race, or 
Church. Adam w^as male and female. The woman, 
^therefore, could not have been the wife of Adam 
as a man masculine, but must signify something 
that w^as adjoined or added to a whole people, 
after they had for indefinite ages enjoyed this 
state of love and innocence. As Eden, the gar- 
den, the rivers, and the gold, are all of the mind, 
so must the woman be also. She must be some 
principle or attribute which man had not pos- 
sessed before. 

Now, what is woman as a representative char- 
acter, whether in the w^orld, in tradition, or in the 
Word of God ? Clearly she is the embodiment 
of that principle of the soul denominated affection. 
In all mythology, in all the symbolic poetry of 
the older times, in all the traditions of the ages, 
when love, devotion, religion — any tender senti- 
ment of heart or grace of spirit which was born 
of gentle affections — was symbolized, delineated, 
mythologically embodied, painted, or sculptured, 
it was alvrays under the form of woman. We 
know that the world now is pretty well upside 
5 D 



50 The Garden of Eden. 

down, and that nothing remains just as it ought 
to be ; but the true woman is still devotion, affec- 
tion, love. That is her distinguishing character- 
istic as compared wdth man ; and when she loses 
that, she loses her sublimest feminine quality and 
distinctive mark. Of the various noble attributes 
of soul, that is the noblest of all. There may be 
masculine women and feminine men, but God did 
not originally create them so. 

So is it also in the Bible. The w^oman sym- 
bolizes w^hatever is characteristically feminine. 
When the Church is spoken of in reference to its 
affection for the Lord, although composed of both 
men and women, it is called ''the Bride, the 
Lamb's wife " ; and it is so called, because of the 
love it is supposed to bear to the Lord as its hus- 
band. Thus it was likened, in the parable, to ten 
virgins w^ho w^ent forth to meet the Bridegroom, 
that is, the Lord. It was called, in older Scrip- 
ture, ^'the virgin daughter of Zion,'' and ^'the 
virgin daughter of Jerusalem." The w^oman is 
the embodiment and representative of the prin- 
ciple of affection. 

But there is also a dark side to this. The pas- 
sions, too, were represented by w^omen. Hatred 
and pride are feminine. But these are affection 
inverted. They are woman in the opposite of 
her genuine character. They are the feminine 
nature as it displays itself when demoralized. 



The Woman. 51 

But woman as a sex had existed in Eden pre- 
vious to this period of the narrative. In the first 
chapter of Genesis, where the creation of Adam 
is spoken of, it is said that ^' God created Adam 
in his own image ; in the image of God created 
he him, male and female created he them." And 
this was before man was placed in Eden. For it 
appears that after men were made, they were ele- 
vated, male and female, into the Eden state, and 
placed in the garden of the Lord. So it was not 
a wife that was now presented to man. The men 
of that Church had already each his own. Nor, 
evidently, could it have been, as a symbol, an 
affection for the Lord for the first time embodied 
in those people's lives. They had eaten of the 
tree of life, and love was already inscribed on 
their inmost hearts. It was something added to 
the Eden state. It was an affection that did not 
originally belong there. As all was made perfect 
at the planting of Eden, anything added to it must 
have been slight indeed, and not known as such, 
but still the first step on the downward path. 

We read, indeed, that God said, ^^ It is not good 
that man should be alone,'' or, according to a closer 
rendering of the original Hebrew, ^^ It is not good 
to man that he should be alone." The implica- 
tion is, that to man, in his then condition, this 
being alone did not seem to be a good thing. He 
began to want something that as yet he did not 



52 The Garden of Eden. 

have. He was somewhat discontented. And then 
it is added that the Lord said, ^' I will make a 
helpmeet for him." But Arius Montaniis, one of 
the best authorities in Hebrew idiomatic difficul- 
ties, gives as the exact translation, ^^ I will make 
one, as it were himself, before him." The proper 
rendering of the whole passage, to put it in idio- 
matic English, seems to be this : ^'And the Lord 
God said, It seemeth not good to man that he 
should be alone ; I will make for him one which 
shall be, as it were himself, before him." This 
helps us much in tracing the spiritual sense. Adam 
in his high Eden state, had been altogether the 
Lord's. He had no consciously-lived selfhood; 
so high and holy were the people of that age ; 
so close were they to the Lord ; so receptive of 
the Lord's life and influence ; so completely under 
the control of his Spirit, that they had a distinct 
perception, a realization from actual experience 
and knowledge, that they were simply living out 
on earth the Lord's inward influence. It is not 
more certain to us, as a physical fact, that the 
blood is coursing through our veins and giving 
life to the whole body, from the heart to the ut- 
most extremities, than it was to them, as a spir- 
itual fact, that the Lord's influence and life perme- 
ated heart, soul and mind, descending into each 
and every act. 

It was a glorious life ! Yet the restless spirit 



The Woman. 53 

of man, in view of the fact that freedom of choice 
was his, began to feel that he would a little rather 
not experience quite so great a dependence on the 
Lord. He said, as it were, "' Oh, how I would 
like to experience this thing called life, as my 
own t How pleasant it would be to feel that / 
think, / will, I desire, 1 speak, / act, and not to 
be always so strongly conscious that it is a higher 
influence to which I am yielding. I feel now, that 
in all this love it is God's love in me, that in all 
this goodness and intelligence it is God's good and 
truth within me, notwithstanding the sensation 
that I think and do as of myself; how much 
better to carry the consciousness that Jam loving, 
/am good, /am intelligent and wise.'' 

The phrase, ''to be alone," in most ancient 
times, was used to denote the most intimate union 
with the Lord. It was a consciousness of Him 
alone as the source of life, goodness and intelli- 
gence. It w^as a rendering to Him alone the meed 
of all good gifts. It was an abiding in Him alone 
as the only stay and rest in all the things of life. 
The first deviation consisted, it seems, in a slight 
discontent with that position, and in a desire to 
mingle self-consciousness in this respect with the 
higher consciousness. It would be no desire to 
deny the Lord as the Creator of life and the Giver 
of all good gifts, but a willingness to recognize 
that truth as a matter of faith, while the feeling 
5* 



64 The Garden of Eden. 

would be that the man himself was the author of 
his own good^ and the discoverer of the truths 
which constituted his own intelligence. It did 
not seem to him good to be alone in the Lord, 
but he wanted himself or his selfhood to be more 
consciously before himself. It was a leaning to- 
ward the love of self-consciousness. It was enter- 
ing into an affection for himself and the things of 
his selfhood, that is, those of his own personality. 
Not but that he had an individuality or a selfhood 
before, but that his life was so pure and disinter- 
ested that he was, as it were, in all his meditations, 
desires and acts, quite unconscious of self. There- 
fore in this divine parable is it written : ''And the 
Lord God said. It seemeth not good to man to be 
alone ; I will make him one that shall be, as it 
were himself, before him.'' And from this time, 
as the first beginning of his fall, man began, in- 
stead of* having the Lord and his neighbor con- 
stantly before him, to have himself before him. 

Now as woman throughout the Word is em- 
ployed as the symbol of affection in its many vary- 
ing phases, and as this divinely inspired narrative 
is in the language of pure symbolism, this affec- 
tion for self was represented by the woman. And 
when it is said that the Lord brought the woman 
unto the man, it is to be understood that He per- 
mitted man, created as he was a free being, to 
have his selfhood as a constantly conscious thing 
before his mind. 



The Woman, 55 

The term selfhood does not fully express the 
idea intended to be conveyed, but it is the best 
English word at hand. The Latin word pro- 
priiim^ or the French le propre, would exactly 
express it. The idea is that man has an individu- 
ality of his own. Then he has also that which is 
the Lord's in him. Somewhat as the earth has a 
material of its own — its soil and rock and sand. 
But the sun flows to earth with its light and 
heat, and gives it vitality. The earth has its 
own separate existence ; but let the sun cease to 
permeate its atmospheres, waters, and soils, and 
it; were a mere dead thing. So the soul of man 
has its own personality ; but let the Lord and 
his life cease to flow in, and there would be no 
flowers of intelligence or fruits of use to make 
beautiful the garden of his mind. With the sun, 
the earth blossoms as a rose ; without the sun it 
were a desert. With the Lord, man's mind is a 
Garden of Eden ; without Him it is a wilderness 
of self, sensuality and sin. Therefore it was a 
beautiful thing when man lived in the sunlight of 
the conscious presence of the Lord ; it was a sad 
step when he descended into his selfhood or pro- 
prium. When this affection for proprium was 
added to his Eden life — when the woman, by his 
own desire, was brought to the man, it was a step 
downward. 

This state of decline is represented by the deep 



56 The Garden of Eden. 

sleep which fell upon Adam. To believe that a 
man called Adam actually went into a deep natural 
sleep wherein a rib was taken from him which 
was built into a woman, requires extraordinary 
credulity. But to think of the sleep into which 
the early Church fell, as a growing obliviousness 
to the higher life and the Lord as its center and 
soul, is an idea entirely consonant with the style 
in which the Scripture is written, and the purpose 
for which it was given. To this day when we see an 
individual or a Church manifesting indifference to 
religious things, we say it has fallen asleep. So 
the entrance of mankind into the state of the pr^)- 
prium, was, in comparison with the spiritually 
wakeful life of the higher state, denominated a 
deep sleep. 

The rib or bone which the Lord took, has some- 
what the same meaning as the woman, for it was 
builded into a woman. It will be seen from the 
marginal reference, that the proper rendering is 
not, of the rib *' made he a woman," but '^ builded 
he a woman." To build, in the Scripture sense, 
is to raise up that which is degraded. Bones are 
comparatively dead things ; flesh is a living thing. 
Bones signify what is spiritually dead ; flesh 
what is spiritually alive. The rib means the self- 
hood, in itself a dead thing; but by closing up 
the flesh instead thereof, and building it into a 
woman, is meant the selfhood vitalized, endued 



Th Woman. 57 

with somewhat of spiritual life, or endowed with 
heavenly affection ; that is to say, the Lord was 
not willing, if man was determined to enter upon 
a state in which self should be the conscious ele- 
ment of his existence, to leave his selfhood dry 
and hard and lifeless. If man was determined to 
depart from the primal order of his life, He would 
give him in that departure as much of spiritual 
life as possible. And He builded his self-con- 
sciousness, selfhood, or proprium, into a form of 
living affection. The dead proprium symbolized 
by the rib, was builded into a spiritualized affection 
adjoined to this self-conscious life, symbolized by 
the woman. 

Thus was it, in this divine parable of Eden, 
that the Lord took the rib — it is not said that He 
took it out of or away from Adam — and closed up 
the flesh in the place thereof, and built it into a 
woman whom He brought to the man. Since 
that day man has been more or less under the 
dominion of the proprium. He has thought and 
loved to think of life and its surroundings as his 
own. If at any time he has risen above this state 
and prostrated himself before the throne of God, 
he may oft and again have been ready to acknowl- 
edge the Lord's position as the center and fountain 
of all, but he still has walked, in some sense, with 
himself forever before his eyes. Not that the con- 
sciousness of personal identity was then or ever. 



58 The Garden of Eden. 

on the principle of the Hindu Nirvana, swallowed 
up in the all-engulfing infinitude of God ; but that, 
at the first, with a clear perception of his own iden- 
tity and freedom as a finite being, he had so full a 
consciousness of the Lord as the life power of his 
soul, and of the Lord's influence as thrilling his 
entire existence, that his life was raised in all 
things above the selfhood, and that he did not 
recognize this last as a motive or element at all 
entering into the joy of living. 

Would we could return to that state! We may 
— under different conditions, indeed ; for the fall 
of the human race has rendered us of a difi'erent 
genius from that of our Temote progenitors ; but to 
all it is given to rise above the proprium. To aid 
us in this, is the true object of religion or relig- 
ious teaching. To succeed in it, is to attain the 
truly Christian life. There is nothing else worth 
living or striving for. Happy they who can see 
this truth and live in the light of it ! 

It is true that this portion of the parable is less 
easy of comprehension than some others ; that its 
meaning does not lie quite so close to the surface. 
To some the explanation may seem abstruse. But 
it must be remembered that, as the history of 
Eden is purely symbolic, it must be so in all its 
parts. As it is a history of minds and states, the 
sleep and the rib and the woman must denote in- 
ternal and mental conditions. The law of corre- 



The Woman. 59 

spondence according to which the Scripture is writ- 
ten, is consistent, whether applied to Genesis, Isaiah 
or John. As this law is alike applicable to the 
unfolding of the true meaning of Genesis and all 
other portions of sacred Writ, we may be sure 
that we are treading on safe ground. The woman, 
in her relation to Adam, will appear again. She 
was the first to listen to the seductive voice of the 
serpent ; the first to eat of the forbidden tree, and 
the first to receive the curse. In tracing these 
events we shall find we have not mistaken her 
symbolic character. 

The lesson of the text is, that evil had its origin 
in human selfhood, and that the first step is the 
mother of sin. Have we ever thought how grand 
a thing life would be, were it elevated above the 
realm of self? How soon its cankering cares 
were gone, how far its shadows sent away, how 
dried of tears its weeping eyes, how soothed to 
smiles its face of sorrow, were it only freed from 
this constant sense of self! Could we not be 
ourselves, yet live for others ? Could we not con- 
sciously receive the beautiful life of the Lord, yet 
pour it ever forth into the hearts of those around 
us ? Could we not walk the earth in joy, yet 
know that all our joys were resting in the bless- 
ings we had shed over others' lives ? How far 
the world is from this to-day ! How long the 
path to return to the point from whence the down- 



60 The Garden of Eden. 

ward journey of the race began ! But, after all, 
it is the only true religion ; and we will never see 
this world a Christian world, until we ourselves 
become a part of its great salvation from the over- 
mastering love of self. Let us pray for it, work 
for it, gather what fruits we can ; for as the first 
step led from Eden away, the first retracing step 
will lead to Eden again. 





IV. 

THE SERPENT. 

Noiu the serpent was more subtle than any 
beast of the field which the Lord God. had 
made.— Gen. iii. 1. 

^E have thus far followed the story of 
Eden from its original planting to the 
period of man's first departure from the 
state of his primitive innocence. We have found 
it to be, not a literal history, but an allegory con- 
structed in accordance with the rules of sacred 
symbolism. We have seen that it relates to no 
one individual, but to the primitive race, or the 
first Church on earth. We have learned that 
Adam was a people, not a person ; that the Garden 
of Eden was their state of love, intelligence and 
happiness, and not a particular place. We have 
dwelt upon the spiritual beauty of the life of 
those people, and the wise innocence of their con- 
dition, and have taken particular notice of how 
supreme in their hearts was the principle of love 
to the Lord. We have seen that the tree of life in 
the midst of the garden was no natural tree, but the 
Lord and his love central in the mind as its only 
faith ; and that eating from the tree was living from 
this principle and nourishing the whole nature with 
6 61 



62 The Garden of Eden. 

this spiritually invigorating food of the soul. Of 
this, so good, so redolent of eternal life, so joy- 
giving, man had been commanded to eat and live. 
But as the tree of life was love of the Lord and 
heavenly things, the tree of knowledge was love 
of self and the world. These principles man was 
commanded not to appropriate as the food of his 
soul ; of this tree he was commanded not to eat, 
for in doing so he would die. 

For a long time man experienced the perfect 
life of Eden. But he at last began to incline to 
the selfhood. He had enjoyed the constant per- 
ception of the Lord's life and influence controlling 
his affections, thoughts and actions. He began 
to desire an independent life. He wanted more 
self-consciousness. The Lord always permits 
man, in moral affairs, to have his own way ; if 
he did not, there would be no human freedom. 
This permission of the Lord in reference to the 
earliest Church, is represented by his taking the 
rib and building it into a woman. The rib — 
hard, dry, bony, in itself dead — symbolizes the 
self-hood, self-consciousness, or propriiim of man. 
His building it into a woman, represents his build- 
ing of this selfhood into a thing of spiritual affec- 
tion, and thus endowing it with the higher life or 
making it a living thing. And the woman be- 
came the symbol of the selfhood vivified, elevated, 
spiritualized. When man inclined to come into 



The Serpent. 63 

this state of more intense self-consciousness, the 
Lord in his love so arranged the change, and kept 
his finger, as it were, on the balance-wheel of his 
nature, so as to render the selfhood itself capable 
of being vivified, elevated and regenerated, in 
order that it might be filled with love to God and 
all heavenly affections. So man was not yet lost. 
The rib which symbolized the self-consciousness 
vitalized with spiritual affection, was so given to 
the man. 

Thus far the allegory of Eden, as we have up 
to this point studied its meaning. 

It is now to be observed that the state of the 
Church, as still being one of great innocence, is 
figuratively described by the words, '^ And they 
were both naked, the man and his vnfe, and were 
not ashamed.^' There is no gross meaning what- 
ever attaching to this language. Nakedness is a 
Scripture expression for innocence. It is a symbol 
as classic as it is ancient, and pervades the paint- 
ings and sculpture of Romans and Greeks. Those 
people were still innocent — so runs the allegory — 
and in their lives of comparative purity, notwith- 
standing they had come into a state of greater 
self-reliance and larger self-consciousness, had 
naught whereof to be ashamed. 

But here there is a change of expression, which, 
while it does not appear in the authorized English 
version of the Bible, is very marked in the 



64 The Garden of Eden. 

original Hebrew. We have seen that the word 
Adam signifies man in general, or mankind, with- 
out relation to sex. But there are in Hebrew, as 
in most of the ancient languages, two words for 
man, while in English we have but one. One 
is Adam, and the other Ish, Adam is man or 
mankind. Ish is an individual male person. 
Now, in sacred allegory these two terms are 
used for different purposes. While Adam repre- 
sents the Church at large, Ish signifies the mascu- 
line principle of the mind. That is to say, man 
as distinguished from woman when symbolically 
used, typifies that principle which renders his a 
masculine mind. In this sense, as woman is 
affection, man is intellect. As woman, in true 
order, is the embodiment of all that is beautiful, 
graceful and affectionate, man is the embodiment 
of all that is strong, rugged and intellectual. 
Woman is not strong in argument, but she is 
keen in perception. Man's intuitions are unre- 
liable, but his reasoning powers are peculiarly 
vigorous. The strong work of the world, whether 
physical or mental, will always be done by man ; 
the refinements of life and its gentler ministra- 
tions will ever belong to woman. The world's 
learning and its progress in science and the 
mechanic arts and in the intellectual part of re- 
ligion, will be urged forward by man ; but it will 
become good and great in the higher sense, through 
the sweet and gentle influence of woman. 



The Serpent 65 

In saying that man is intellect and woman affec- 
tion, it is not meant that woman may not be in- 
tellectual and man affectionate ; but that in the 
one, intellect is the predominant characteristic, 
and gives tone to the whole nature ; while in the 
other, affection is the predominant characteristic, 
and brings all the other faculties of the mind be- 
neath its sway, Nor is it meant that we do not 
sometimes see all this reversed. But the excep- 
tions do not overturn or disprove the rule ; nor 
has even the degeneracy of these latter days suc- 
ceeded in reversing, to any large extent, the well- 
defined distinction between the sexes. 

So also in each mind, whether of man or woman, 
there is the masculine and feminine element. The 
man has his intellectual faculties, and his affec- 
tional or sentimental nature. But in him, if he 
be a true man, the first are in control, and give 
tone, vigor and character to all else within him. 
The woman may also be endowed with great in- 
telligence ; but if she be a true woman, the per- 
ceptions, sentiments and affections will give tone, 
vigor and character to all else within her. This 
has been recognized in the civilization of all ages ; 
and man stands, by the very law of his creation, 
as the type of intellect, and woman as that of 
affection. In inspired writings these types are 
more pronounced than in fable or tradition. And 
we find that a sudden change is made in the latter 
6* E 



6(3 The Garden of Eden. 

part of the second chapter of Genesis. Up to 
this time Adam had been spoken of; now the 
term is Ish, or man as distinguished from woman. 
This is because the two elements of the mind of 
that time — elements common to the mind in all 
ages — are here distinctively brought into view. 
As a historical narrative, this would be a contra- 
diction for which no possible reason could be given ; 
but as an allegory in which the two distinctive 
elements of human nature, each of which per- 
formed its part in bringing about the fall of man, 
are brought prominently into view, it is a neces- 
sity. 

Having enlarged upon this point w^hich wall be 
found to have a strong bearing upon what follows, 
and to be necessary to a full understanding of it, 
let us next consider w4iat this serpent was, which 
was the cause of so great disaster to the Church 
in Eden. 

In ancient times those w^ere called serpents who 
had more confidence in sensual things than in re- 
vealed truth ; and it was not only customary then 
to compare the sensual principle of human nature 
to the serpent, but to call it so. But let us be 
sure that w^e fully understand the manner in 
which we use this term. The w^ord sensuality 
is so commonly mixcel in the mind with ideas 
pertaining" to the indulgence of the appetite, or 
to luxurious and carnal pleasures, that in using it 



The Serpent. 67 

the first thought is apt to revert to things of this 
nature. This is only a limited application of the 
term. Properly, everything is sensual that per- 
tains to the senses. One may be exceedingly 
sensual, and yet not given to luxuriousness, glut- 
tony or wine-bibbing. The sensual man, in the 
broader view, is one who believes only on the 
evidence of his senses. He will deny the exist- 
ence of spirit because he cannot see it with his 
natural eyes or touch it with his natural fingers. 
He will deny the life after death, because it has 
not been made manifest to his bodily senses. He 
will deny all things supernatural, because, being 
neither visible nor tangible, they cannot be chem- 
ically analyzed, nor probed by the instruments of 
the surgeon. He will deny even a God, because 
He is not visible to the natural eye, and cannot 
be seen working out his problems of creation and 
preservation according to his own sensuous con- 
ception. The sensual man has never allowed the 
spiritual plane of his mind to be opened. He has 
no spiritual grasp. He cannot comprehend a spir- 
itual idea when presented to him. He knows about 
the things of earth because he sees them — because 
they are palpable to his senses. He will even be- 
lieve things he has not seen, so far as they are 
subjects of sensuous evidence ; and will accept the 
testimony of other people when their reasonings 
are based upon natural science, such as chemistry, 



68 The Garden of Eden. 

mechanics or mathematics. But not a ray of spir- 
itual light penetrates his understanding, and he 
denies the supernatural simply because it is super- 
natural. He is immersed in sensual things ; he 
lives for this world only, because this only he sees 
and feels. To him it is the extremest folly to at- 
tempt to cultivate the spiritual part of our nature, 
or to live for the great Hereafter. 

The picture thus drawn is that of the extreme 
sensual man. It has innumerable modifications. 
The sensual principle may exercise control in 
various degrees. It may control the man largely 
or only to a slight extent. It may make him 
doubtful of spiritual things, without bringing him 
to the point of absolute denial. It may make him 
indifferent, without rendering him a conscious 
skeptic. It may keep him at the point to w^hich 
he has been educated, without permitting him to 
go beyond it. It may bind him with the chains 
of religious tradition, and forbid him from soaring 
into the realms of genuine truth. Christians even 
may be sensual men ; and rest their faith on his- 
torical evidence, or on sensuous miracles. Even 
apostleship had its sensuous-minded Thomas, who 
would not believe in the risen Saviour unless he 
could see in his hands the print of the nails, and 
lay his finger upon them, and thrust his hand into 
his side. 

The sensual principle is good so far as it is 



The Serpent 69 

under the control of the spiritual, but it is bad 
when it sets up for itself. In the order of creation 
as related in the allegory of Genesis, Adam was 
given dominion over the fish of the sea, and over 
the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over 
all the earth, and over every creeping thing that 
creepeth upon the earth. The earth symbolized 
the mind ; the fish of the sea, the know^ledges 
of things gathered in the memory ; the fowls 
of the air, the thoughts that sweep like winged 
creatures across the mental firmament; the cattle 
or beasts, affections of various kinds ; the creep- 
ing things, the lowest forms or principles of 
the mind, including the serpent, its sensual 
principle. Everything was good while man had 
dominion over it. Even the sensual element 
of his being led him to interest himself in his 
natural wants, provide for himself food, clothing 
and habitation, and study the things of earth as 
representatives of heavenly things, and proofs of 
the Lord's mercy, love and care. But when the 
sensual principle, instead of being under the do- 
minion of the higher and properly human, assumed 
dominion over it, then it was a very bad thing. 
The serpent trailed its way through the Eden 
state of the most ancient Church, until it became 
wiser than woman, wiser than man, wiser than 
God; and then Eden became a desolation, and 
man lost the impress of Jiis Maker. 



70 The Garden of Eden, 

The most ancient people denominated the sen- 
sual nature the serpent, because as serpents live 
close to the earth, so does the sensual principle 
cling closely to the world, to nature, and things of 
sense. The symbol is maintained throughout the 
Scripture. Our Lord called the Pharisees, '' Ye 
serpents; ye generation of vipers,'' in relation to 
their having made religion a mere thing of sensu- 
ous ceremony. The devil is called a serpent (Rev. 
xii. 9), because of his desire to overthrow the do- 
minion of the spiritual and celestial in man, and 
to seduce him by specious and sensuous reasonings. 
And these reasonings, arguments and seductive 
influences of the sensual nature, are denominated 
in Scripture the poison of the serpent (Ps. Iviii. 
3-6). Therefore in this allegory of Eden, the ser- 
pent is said to be more subtle than any beast of 
the field w^hich the Lord God had made ; because, 
of all cunning arts, of all sophistry and sophistical 
reasoning, of all promises that are sweet to the 
ear and destructive to the soul, those employed by 
the sensual nature and by sensuous men are the 
most sw^eet, cunning and sophistical, yet false and 
soul destroying. The serpent of the soul — the 
sensuous principle — is the most false and subtle 
of all the beasts of the field, of all the affections of 
the mind. 

Yet the Lord made it. But He made it good. 
He put it in its place. He placed it under the 



The Serpent. 71 

doaiinion of man, and man recognized this. For 
when it is said that, " Out of the ground the 
Lord God formed every beast of the field, and 
every fowl of the air, and brought them unto 
Adam to see what he would call them ; and what- 
soever Adam called every living creature, that 
was the name thereof,'^ a very suggestive truth is 
couched under the symbolism. It means that 
Adam, or primitive man, was aware of the ex- 
istence of the various affections of the mind signi- 
fied by the different beasts of the field, and of the 
various forms of thought signified by every fowl 
of the air. By the Lord's bringing the beasts 
and birds to him, is meant that in the providence 
of God his various forms of affection and thought 
were permitted to arrange themselves before his 
mind as matters of conscious knowledge and re- 
flection. But by Adam's giving them names, is 
signified that he could call them all by their right 
names, that is, could recognize their comparative 
value and quality, and assign to each, with quick 
intuition, its proper sphere. 

For every name in olden times expressed the 
character or quality of the object named ; and 
to name a thing was to designate its character 
or determ.ine its quality. For symbolism was 
founded on the very nature of things, and the 
man of that time was able to analyze the attri- 
butes of his soul, and to name each correctly, and 



72 The Garden of Eden. 

estimate its relative value, and assign to it its 
proper rank. Thus the lamb and the dove element 
— the innocence of the soul — would be elevated ; 
but the serpent element — the sensual nature — 
would be used as a servant and not as a master. 
So among the other beasts of the field, to give the 
serpent its name was to estimate sensuous things 
at their true value, to understand their office as 
being simply to enable man to perform his duties 
in this world, to permit them to testify concern- 
ing earth as a representative of heaven, and to 
use them as testimonies to the existence of the 
Lord, and to his nature, love and care. But that 
sensuous reasonings should close up the spiritual 
plane of the mind, cut off the power of spiritual 
thought, darken the pathway to immortality and 
heaven, or deny their Creator and Lord, such a 
thought could not be even entertained. 

But when man began to incline to his selfhood, 
to desire to be guided more by himself and less 
by the Lord, then the power of the serpent began 
to assert itself. While men were conscious of 
the Lord as their guide, the serpent could have 
nothing to say on spiritual subjects. He went 
his way quietly on his destined earthly round of 
duty. True, after the inclination to the pro- 
prium^ there was love, and innocence, and peace, 
still in a modified form, breathing through all the 
fields of Eden. But self-love or the proprium 



Tl\e Serpent. 73 

in its best form, is an unsafe guide. If it looks 
to the Lord indeed, it is safe ; but if it looks any- 
where else it is lost. And it does not look to the 
Lord except in the case when man is wholly 
above its influence. 

We have seen how man departed from his first 
estate, and inclined to the selfhood. We have 
followed the allegory as it described the fact. We 
have found, also, that with his greater self-con- 
sciousness, he was still endowed with a principle 
of goodness and innocence. The woman became 
a symbol of this affection for the selfhood. A 
new title is used for man, meaning not mankind 
as Adam did, but man as distinguished from 
woman. And this term for man is a symbol of 
the intellectual nature. So the serpent first ap- 
plied himself to the woman. In other words, the 
sensuous principle of the mind began its work 
upon the selfhood. Sensual and sophistical reason- 
ings about spiritual things, began to be used in 
place of the celestial perceptions which once had 
sway ; and they went direct to the proprium as 
the easiest thing to seduce. Perhaps there were 
in those days Tom Paines, Yoltaires, and Inger- 
solls to say to the proprium, '' Yea, hath God said 
ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden," 
to insinuate a doubt whether the words of the 
Lord were true ; whether the love-life was the 
best life ; whether the Lord or self was the real 



74 The Garden of Eden. 

guide ; whether these so-called perceptions were 
not delusions ; whether the best evidence was not 
the evidence of the senses ; whether this being 
led by self was not a pleasant experience ; whether 
it was reallv death to the soul ; whether these old 
ideas of their forefathers were not mere supersti- 
tions having no foundation in common sense ; and 
a hundred other similar doubts which the sensual 
principle is capable of insinuating, and then of 
satisfactorily answering to inflated self-conscious- 
ness and pride. 

So was it, doubtless, that the serpent talked to 
the woman ; and the woman, touched with the ar- 
gument, goes direct to the man. That is, self-love 
being beguiled, in its turn beguiles the intellect. 
This, perhaps, was not the work of a year, nor of a 
hundred years. It was the working of the leaven 
of sensuousness in the human family for thousands 
of years, probably, dragging it down to the lower 
levels of life. 

And in this we find the true history of the origin 
of evil. Evil originated, not in the machinations 
of a serpent who beguiled a single woman, but in 
self-love yielding to arguments founded on sensu- 
ous appearances. Man was created upright, but 
free. He inclined to self; he listened to the delu- 
sive whisperings of sense and his sensual nature ; 
he let go his hold on God and his love, and so 
brouofht evil into the world. 



The Serpent. 75 

We leave the subject here to resume it again — ■ 
for the story of the serpent is yet but half told. 

But of one thing we may all be conscious. The 
origin of evil is still in every soul, the whispering 
of the serpent to the woman. Self-consciousness 
is to most people their very life. Our love of 
sensuous things drags us down to the lowest 
levels. If we deny God and immortality, it is 
the delusion of sense. If we hesitate or doubt, 
it is the delusion of sense. If we cannot grasp 
spiritual thoughts, it is because we are deluded 
by sense. If we cannot open our understandings 
to the light that comes only from on high, it is 
sense that hinders. And through all our denials 
and doubts, it is sense and its delusions that rule 
the soul. It comes to us in many forms, deceives 
in many ways, but it comes always in hatred of 
that which is holy. It drowns the soul in dissi- 
pation or overwhelms it in pleasures ; it elates it 
with ambition ; it makes it in dreams a demi-god. 
It puts self in the center of its little universe, and 
causes all things to revolve around it. It bends 
all activities, all beings, all life, to serve one's 
personal ends, whether of ambition, pleasure or 
greed. And what is worse than all, it persuades 
the soul that this is the only right and proper 
thing to do, that it has the sanction of religion, 
and that anything else is superstition. This ser- 
pent is the deluding principle of the universe. It 



76 The Garden of Eden. 

warms itself by every fireside ; it hides itself in 
every social gathering ; it conceals itself in work- 
shop and store, and holds high carnival on change ; 
it does our buying and selling ; its voice is heard 
in every passing conversation ; it governs wherever 
rulers congregate ; and it is insidiously coiled in 
the very aisles and pews of our churches. It 
trails its slimy way in highways and byways, 
homes and hearts, and its poison pervades the 
world. Ah ! could we rise above these delusions 
of sense, could we but believe in and follow the 
Lord with half the zeal and energy with which 
we listen to and serve the serpent, this were a 
world worth living in. We can — we must. It 
is the only true salvation. 





V. 



THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT, 

And when the woman saw that the tree iva^ 
good for food, and that it ivas pleasant to 
the eyes and a tree to be desired to make one 
ivise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did 
eat, and gave also unto her husband with 
her; and he did eat.— Gen. iii. 6. 

)S we familiarize our minds with the idea 
that this narrative of the Garden of Eden 
is purely allegorical, we experience less and 
less difficulty in grasping its real meaning, and in 
satisfactorily applying the laws of symbolism to 
its interpretation. The different events begin to 
group themselves naturally around the central 
truth, that Adam was the whole Church of the 
early age of the world, and not a single individual. 
We learn from the allegory that these people lived 
in the Garden of Eden, that is, in innocence and 
peace, in the very presence of the Lord and under 
his holy and immediate influence ; that they re- 
mained in this state for a long period, eating of 
the tree of life in the midst of the garden, that is, 
living from the Lord as the inmost principle of 
thought and love ; that they began to desire to 
feel the spiritual life as more their own and less 
the Lord's in them ; that they inclined more and 
7* 77 



78 The Garden of Eden. 

more to self-consciousness or the selfhood; and 
then the sensual principle — the serpent — began to 
assume control of the mind and to become a con- 
spicuous figure in this Garden. 

Sensuousness I have defined as the disposition 
to limit one's life to the small area of existence 
which comes within the purview of the natural 
senses. The principle is broad in its scope, but 
it invests life with the merely natural, and rejects, 
as a thing undesirable or unknowable, the super- 
natural. If we are Christians, under the influ- 
ence of this principle we are apt to be very weak 
or very indifferent ones. If we seem to be earnest 
in our faith, that faith is based upon what we 
conceive to be a correct historical record of the 
coming of Christ, and of the miraculous evidence by 
which his character was proven. If, however, 
we are hurried by its advice, or under the impetus 
of its insinuations, away from Christianity, it 
forbids us to recognize God because natural sense 
has never seen Him; or to believe in another 
life, because natural law has been unable to prove 
it ; or even to acknowledge the existence of the 
soul, because no dissecting knife has ever suc- 
ceeded in reaching its seat. It is a harsh term, 
perhaps, to apply to so eminent a scientist as 
Tyndall, yet he is a strong type of the sensuous 
man, when he asserts in substance : I do not deny 
God, for I know nothing about Him ; yet I do 



The Forbidden Fruit. 79 

not believe in God, for these senses of mine have 
never seen Him, felt Him or touched Him. I 
believe onlv what sense and natural science prove. 
There may be plenty of undiscovered truths, but 
I rest my faith only in w^hat I scientifically know. 

Yery moral men may, after this manner, be 
sensualists. But the effect of such sensuous reason- 
ing is demoralizing in the extreme. Pride may 
keep the strong sensual man from moral degrada- 
tion. But when you efface from the mind spiritual 
intelligence, and substitute natural reason ; or 
when you darken those spiritual lights, which 
are the stars of its higher consciousness pene- 
trating all dark places with spiritual discernment, 
you take away that Avhich gives this world its 
only life and hope. Then the man of weak mind, 
or he who has no stay of pride, sinks into dissipa- 
tion and debauchery ; this world becomes his all 
in all ; its money, fame or pleasure, his only hope 
and joy ; himself and his own gratification the 
only things worth living for. The Lord, the di- 
vine Sun, is blotted from his firmament ; beyond 
the grave there is naught for him but darkness ; 
to make the most of this world is his supreme 
purpose. So the serpent— type of the sensual 
nature — as monitor and guide, is the world's ruin. 

What wonder, then, that in olden times, when 
he once gained the ear of those who dwelt in 
Eden, he advised them to their fall. Subtle he 



80 The Garden of Eden. 

was and bold ; ^^ More subtle than any wild beast 
of the jBeld.'' Is not the sensual nature the most 
crafty of all the affections of the mind? What 
argument so specious as that which insinuates 
questions like these : Who but a fool would be- 
lieve in that which is not evident to the senses? 
Why should you deny yourselves the delights of 
self, of enjoyments so palpable and abounding, of 
pleasures so exquisite and close at hand, in the 
vain pursuit of that phantom called eternal life, 
that folly of superstitious follies called unselfish- 
ness ? 

So to the Eden people of old, it was the sen- 
suous thought entering into the mind — the serpent 
trailing his tortuous way into life — which did the 
mischief that was done. The woman, as the sym- 
bol of affection in general, here, in view of the 
manner in which her name is used in the allegory, 
is made to represent specifically the affection for 
the selfhood. It was to her, therefore, to the self- 
hood ever ready to listen to any suggestion which 
increased its power or pleasure, that the serpent 
applied itself. *' Yea, hath God said. Ye shall not 
eat of the tree of the garden ? '' Was it really true 
that God had counseled them not to draw spiritual 
life from any perception of the mind which could 
grow in such a place as Eden ? Were not its trees 
all good ? Were not all the perceptions which grew 
in the soil of innocence, purity and love, genuine 



The Forbidden Fruit 81 

and true ? Why forbid themselves anything that 
came from so divine a source ? This was sophis- 
try, the serpent's cunning, in its most unadul- 
terated form. Without mentioning the tree of 
knowledge, this reasoning included it — evidently 
insinuating that it also must be good, because it 
was one of the trees of Eden. Eden was all good, 
how could any of its trees be bad ? The Eden state 
was all purity, how could any perception of the 
mind be false ? Follow this new dictate, was the 
insinuation ; it is of Eden in the heart, and it is 
therefore right. 

But the selfhood was not immediately satisfied. 
It had been endowed by the Lord with spiritual 
life ; it had been elevated into spiritual atmos- 
pheres ; and even the self-consciousness, in its 
higher state, was not so easily convinced. So 
the woman's answer to the serpent's delusive in- 
sinuation was : ^' We mav eat of the fruit of the 
trees of the garden ; but of the fruit of the tree 
which is in the midst of the garden, God hath 
said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch 
it, lest ye die." It was evident that of all the 
trees of the garden they might eat, with this 
single exception. All perceptions of the mind 
were from the Lord ; all that belonged to the 
Eden state and was rooted in its soil — perceptions 
of truth, of good, of love, of God, and whatso- 
ever intelligence sprang from them — ail these 
F 



82 The Garden of Eden. 

wei^e from the Lord. But the tree of the knowl- 
edge of good and evil was the idea of self as the 
origin of spiritual life, and that certainly was not 
from the Lord. They still saw this ; it was not 
entirely obliterated from their consciousness. And 
God had said that not only should they not eat 
of it, not only ought they not to conceive of the 
souPs life as a thing of self, but they must not 
touch it, they must not even dream of such a 
thing, they must not for a moment come in con- 
tact with such an experience. For the consequence 
of so doing would be that they would die. All 
relapsing into self is spiritual death. It is not 
the decease of the body, nor the annihilation of 
the soul. It is not ceasing to think, will and act. 
It is the death of good — the death of genuine dis- 
interested love ; the lapsing into evil and falsity ; 
the loss of all power to know, appreciate, live, or 
even comprehend the spiritual side of life, and God 
as its giver. This is to die in the spiritual 
sense. 

But the serpent seemed to speak of natural death. 
He always speaks naturally. And it is of the na- 
ture of the sensual principle to lead us aw^ay from 
the true meaning of things, and make us satisfied 
to rest in mere appearances. So the serpent said 
to the woman, that is, the sensual element replied 
to the doubts of the better selfhood, '' Ye shall not 
surely die ; for God doth know that in the day ye 



The Forbidden Fruit 83 

eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye 
shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.'' 

Now it is a fact that, to this day, so inclined 
are the large mass of people to take sensuous 
views of things, that it is generally believed that 
natural death came into the world because two 
individuals, Adam and Eve, ate of the fruit of a 
natural tree. It is not seen that mankind fell, not 
because of any natural act of disobedience, nor 
because of anything heedlessly done on the nat- 
ural plane, but because they became selfish, worldly 
and sensual. The first idea so generally accepted, 
is devoid of all rationality ; the other commends 
itself to reason and common sense. 

*'Ye shall not surely die," said the serpent. 
Instead thereof, '' Your eyes shall be opened, and 
ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." That 
their eyes would be opened, means that their under- 
standings would be enlightened. That they would 
be as gods knowing good and evil, means that their 
power to distinguish between good and evil would 
be seen or thought of as a faculty originating in 
themselves ; and that thus each one would be, as 
it were, a god unto himself, deciding for himself 
and from himself, and in the light of his own in- 
telligence, what was good and what was evil. 

Now, the effect of such an idea as this, we see 
plainly enough in the v/orld's present condition. 
When human reason decides as to what is truth 



84 The Garden of Eden, 

and what is falsity, with the serpent as chief 
pleader and the selfhood as umpire, spiritual 
truth has no chance of acceptance. And when 
human reason is, under the same conditions, the 
arbiter of good and evil, good becomes whatever 
panders to the pleasure, profit and aggrandize- 
ment of one's self, and evil whatever is in opposi- 
tion thereto. Each man is a god unto himself; 
each man decides for himself; each man is self- 
glorified. This was the tendency with our early 
progenitors. The serpent that now holds high 
carnival in the world, was then exerting his most 
seductive influence. 

We have considered the tree of life as the Lord 
and his love, and the tree of knowledge as self 
and science. Eating of the one or the other sym- 
bolizes appropriating the one or the other of these 
principles to the life of the soul. We know that 
natural eating is for the sustenance and invigora- 
tion of the natural body. The food, or the life- 
giving elements of the food, are conveyed by the 
blood to the various organs of the system, and 
distributed according to the needs of this or that 
portion of the body. Its many parts, the brain, 
the muscle, the flesh, the bone, the nervous fluid, 
the cuticle, each and all partake of the blessings 
and the benefits. And the body lives and grows 
and strengthens by means of the food whereof it 
partakes ; and the condition of the body, whether 



The Forbidden Fruit. 85 

healthy or diseased, well or ill, depends very 
much on the character of its food. Good food 
makes a sound body ; insufficient or improper 
food, an unsound one. 

The correspondence of the natural with the 
spiritual system and its economy is exact. It is 
a matter of the greatest consequence whether we 
partake of nourishing spiritual diet or of that 
which is injurious. The Word of God every- 
where recognizes this. It is for this reason that 
our Lord says by the mouth of his prophet, ^' Eat 
ye what is good, and let your soul delight itself 
in fatness ^^ (Isa. Iv. 2) ; and that He said, when 
on earth, ^^ Labor not for the meat which perisheth, 
but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting 
life, which' the Son of man shall give unto you '' 
(John vi. 2^). Again, ^' I am the living bread which 
came down from heaven ; if any man eat of this 
bread, he shall live forever" (Johnvi. 51). And 
again, "■ He that eateth me, even he shall live by 
me '' (John vi. 5t). Say we not well, then, when 
we assert that the Lord is the veritable tree of 
life which grows in the midst of Eden ? Draw 
we then our food from Him, eat we of the fruit 
of that divine tree, recognize we his influence 
within our souls, obey we all his commands in 
their true spirit and intent, love we the higher 
life proceeding from the Lord who is in the midst 
of our mental garden, then truly do we live. The 



86 The Garden of Eden. 

fruit of the tree of life is all the goodness and 
wisdom which we receive from the Lord— humbly 
acknowledging that it is his and not our own — 
and appropriate to the upbuilding and sustenance 
of the soul. Eat we of the fruit of that tree, and 
its life-giving principles flow down into every 
least thing of the spirit. They give light to the 
understanding, purity to the desire, sweetness to 
the affections, wisdom to the thought ; they go 
down into the labors and works of the hands, and 
spiritualize every least act of life. They nourish, 
invigorate, sustain and build up the spiritual man 
into a glorious image and likeness of God. Life 
becomes love in its highest sense, and the joy of 
existence a thing unutterable ! 

But the tree of knowledge is self and science. 
Its fruit is error and falsity, evil and crime. We 
throw aside revelation ; we deny its truth ; we 
divorce our understanding from its fountain of 
wisdom ; and we say, Let us rely on science or 
the senses. We read no more the commandments 
of God; we relegate those precepts to the realm 
of the impracticable ; we grow indifferent to the 
voice of the Lord as it fain would speak to us in 
the garden of the mind ; and we say, Let us con- 
sider self-preservation, and the wealth, honors 
and pleasures of the world, as the things most 
near at hand and of most immediate need. Then 
we eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree. The 



The Forbidden Fruit 87 

Lord did not desire man's spiritual death. He 
would not have him rest in mere worldly joys 
when there is a higher life ; nor live merely for 
self when the well-being of his kind demands his 
services ; nor study only his interest in this world, 
when there is an eternal world for which he was 
placed here to prepare. He would not have him 
shrivel his faculties, when they were made for 
wide expansion ; nor invert the law of life when 
he is capable of enjoying its unspeakable blessings ; 
nor become a creature of disorder and selfishness, 
when he was created in the grandest order and 
for the highest use. He would not have him 
confine his aims and ends to the body and this 
world, nor his reasoning faculties to natural sci- 
ence, when by doing so he loses the higher wisdom 
and fails to attain the higher and purer life. He 
would not have him wallow in the filthy mire of 
sensuous delights, when there are sweet fields of 
heavenly joy wherein to live and take pleasure. 
He would not have him a mere animal, when He 
had created him to be an angel. For as the fruit 
of the tree of life was goodness and wisdom, the 
fruit of the tree of knowledge was evil and error, 
crime and insanity. Therefore was it that the 
Lord commanded man not to eat of this, the for- 
bidden fruit. Grod is not possessed of the human 
passion of pride. He did not utter an arbitrary 
edict for the sake of enjoying man's servile obedi- 



88 The Garden of Eden. 

ence. He did not make life and happiness to de- 
pend on refraining from a certain natural fruit. 
It is only sensuous thought that so drags the Lord 
down to the level of human frailty. He com- 
manded man not to live from self, not to draw his 
mental food from sensuous science, not to place 
his life in mere knowledge ; because, if he did, his 
spiritual nature would die. What He commanded 
was solely for man's own happiness and good. 

But man ate. He no longer looked to the Lord 
for the food of his soul, but to self. He lost sight 
of those words of divine beauty, '* He that eateth 
me, even he shall live by me ; " and he made a god 
of himself instead, and recognized no other source 
of life. This food he ate, or appropriated as the 
life of his soul. With this he nourished all his 
faculties. It went through his w^hole system ; it 
permeated his w^hole character ; it poisoned his 
affections ; it darkened his understanding ; it nour- 
ished hatreds, cruelties and revenges ; it rendered 
him incapable of spiritual perception ; it capaci- 
tated him for crime ; and it flung the world, as its 
final outcome, into that seething cauldron of misery, 
war and unrest, which is so largely our lot to-day. 
And so will the world remain until we cease to eat 
of the forbidden fruit, the source of all our woe, 
and return to Eden and the Lord. 

There is an expression introduced into the third 
chapter of Genesis, which seems contradictory of 



The Forbidden Fruit 89 

the second. The tree of knowledge is here said 
to be in the midst of the garden ; whereas previ- 
ously it was asserted that the tree of life was in 
the midst of the garden. It is one of those points 
of which there are many, which infidel writers, 
reasoning from the serpent's point of view, hold 
up to prove the inconsistency and foolishness of 
Scripture. They reason from the standpoint of 
the letter. If you tell them it is a spiritual alle- 
gory, they vv^ill laugh at you ; and if you attempt 
to show them that it is, they will understand you 
no more than if you spoke in an unknown tongue. 
Their spiritual understanding is closed to the higher 
light. But in the spiritual sense of these and all 
similar passages, the apparent inconsistency van- 
ishes. The explanation is simply this : In the 
primitive condition of the people of the first 
Church, just as they were placed in the Eden 
state, the tree of life, or the Lord and his love, 
was in the midst of the garden ; love occupied the 
central place in the soul ; for it was in the very 
inmost of the heart, and the central source of the 
mind's intelligence. Bat after they began to listen 
to the serpent, the tree of life occupied no more 
the center, but the tree of knowledge took its place 
in the inmost of the soul, and self assumed the 
position which the Lord had previously held. 

But in explaining these symbols, in order to 
bring out their meaning in bold relief, we find 



90 The Garden of Eden. 

ourselves sometimes painting the principles repre- 
sented in their extremest colors. Eating of the 
tree of knowledge, like all other spiritual habits, 
is a thing that comes gradually, and becomes a 
habit only by a slow process. The world at that 
early age did not change in a day, nor in a year, 
perhaps not in a hundred years. The serpent's 
voice, feeble at first, grew strong as time rolled on. 
Listened to at the beginning but feebly, the atten- 
tion of the race became more fixed and their incli- 
nation to obey more strong as listening became a 
habit. Constant dallying with the subject on the 
part of man, gradually made the serpent more 
bold. The woman — the affection for the selfhood 
— was first approached. It was only by slow de- 
grees she began to see that this fruit of the tree 
of knowledge was ^^good for food," or began to 
consider sense and science as things in themselves 
good. Yielding to this, they became also ''pleas- 
ant to the eyes," in other words, agreeable to the 
understanding. And finally they were seen by 
the selfhood to be things '' to be desired to make 
one wise ; " that is, that they were really desirable, 
because they gratified the pride of self-intelligence, 
and made the man eminently wise in his own 
eyes. 

And thus — so runs the narrative — when the 
woman saw these things '' she took of the fruit 



The Forbidden Fruit 91 

thereof and did eat, and gave also unto her hus- 
band with her, and he did eat.'' 

Man as distinguished from woman, as was ob- 
served in a former discourse, symbolizes the intel- 
lect. Thus it was the woman who ate first — the 
love of self or the proprium. And then she in 
turn persuaded the man to eat. When the love of 
self appropriated as its food the delusions of sense, 
the intellect soon yielded its concurrence. It is 
the experience of all time. When we are on the 
downward path, what we love we are very apt to 
persuade ourselves is right. Into the arms of 
whatever evil the heart throws itself, intellect and 
reason are called upon for their assent, and they 
soon yield. The fall of each and every man and 
woman begins and ends in a similar way. 

But as before observed, we have described the 
symbols in their more extreme meanings. The 
fall was gradual, extending perhaps through 
hundreds or even thousands of years. The fruit 
of the tree of knowledge changed its quality 
as time went on. The first aberration from the 
primal condition, was in life. From generation 
to generation the Adamic Church inclined to self 
and evil more and more. Still the true life would 
be acknowledged ; but it would become, as one 
generation succeeded another, more and more a 
matter of mere faith, and less and less a matter 
of experience. Then gradually, with many, faith 



92 The Garden of Eden. 

itself would begin to yield, while perhaps with 
others it would be longer retained. Thus at first 
the fruit of the forbidden tree was faith as the 
basis of religion. This also would be forbidden, 
because love is its true basis. Then its fruit 
became error ; and at last positive falsity. The 
eating by the woman was a work of centuries ; 
the offering to the man and his eating a work of 
centuries more. The letter makes it, in the fall 
of a man, the work of a day ; the spirit makes it, 
in the fall of a race, the work of a period of in- 
definite and unknown length. 

And so let us still follow the lesson in our 
hearts, and contemplate all its admonitions as 
given to make us wiser in our generation. There 
is only one tree whose fruit is life, for us as well 
as for our early progenitors. It is the Lord him- 
self enthroned within the heart. It is that prin- 
ciple of love, so large, so all-embracing, so divine, 
that the mind of its possessor is an Eden of 
intelligence and delight. Its branches are far 
reaching ; its roots strike deep ; its fruits are all 
goodness and wisdom, and they nourish the soul 
from its centers of affection and thought to its 
extremities of active life and work. Other trees 
there are in the garden which contribute to life ; 
other perceptions of the soul which are suggested 
from within and without ; but this tree is Life 
Itself. Let us ask nothing of sense and science. 



The Forbidden Fruit 



93 



except that they be ^villing servants of the Lord 
and love. Let us eat of no fruit that will exalt 
sense and drag down the soul, that will magnify 
self and degrade the Lord. Spiritual life and 
spiritual death are before us, according to the 
kind of fruit our souls eat or appropriate. Let us 
eat of the fruit of the tree of life and truly live ! 





VI. 

THE CURSE. 

And unto Adam he said, Because thou 
hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, 
and hast eaten of the tree of uiiich I com- 
manded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat 
of it, cursed is the ground for thy sake.— 
Gen. iii. 17. 

jJHE curses expressed in the Bible are pecu- 
liar. They bear no similarity to those 

^'^ evoked by human passion. When man, 
under the influence of a feeling that is born of 
sin, bursts forth into profane ravings against the 
neighbor, invoking maledictions on his head, he 
speaks under the prompting influence of hell. It 
is anger, or resentment, or revenge, wounded pride 
or defeated purpose, that would deal damnation 
and ruin to the offending party. Resentment in 
any form is as far from the Lord's nature as it is 
possible for anything to be. 

Is it not strange that men will persistently 
attribute to God that which all condemn in a 
professed servant of God? Is it not amazing 
that they will clothe the Divine Being with hu- 
man passions, when the whole end and aim of 
Christianity is to lead man to curb and subdue the 
same passions ? Who would justify resentments, 
maledictions or curses in a Christian ? And how 

94 



Tlie Ourse. 95 

shall we ascribe those attributes to Him, the recep- 
tion of whose spirit alone it is that makes one a 
Christian ? 

How then are we to understand the Scripture 
which seems to attribute cursings to God ? The 
answer is simple. In the literal sense, the lan- 
guage of the Bible is that of appearance ; in the 
spiritual sense it is that of reality. And that 
meaning is generally attributed to it by man, 
which accords with his own instincts. This last 
assertion is true of our every-day conversation. 
If a man is brutal, there is an element of brutality 
entering into his conception of every word that is 
addressed to him. If he is sensual, there is to him 
an element of sensuality which enters into every 
expression that he hears. If he is essentially im- 
modest, his mind instinctively turns the purest 
words into expressions of beastly sentiment. But 
if he is spiritual, to him all things are clothed with 
spirituality ; if pure, all things with purity. 

To all expressions, therefore, there is a higher 
import and a lower. The lower the thought, the 
lower the sense it will attach to words ; the higher 
the thought, the more elevated the idea, and the 
more exalted its conception of the meaning which 
expressions are designed to convey. And this 
has caused the world's trouble in construing holy 
Writ. A pagan age has invested its terms with 
pagan meanings ; a sensuous age with sensuous 



96 The (jlarden of Edm. 

ideas ; the natural mind with gross natural con- 
ceptions. 

Now in this matter of cursings, as human utter- 
ances they are evil in themselves, and spring from 
evil in the heart of him who utters them. And 
men of evil passions instinctively ascribe to the 
Lord, when they read expressions of this kind, 
the same fire of passion w^hich they feel within 
themselves. But the Lord is a Being of infinite 
love, charity and mercy. A curse, therefore, when 
attributed in the Scripture to Him, must be an ex- 
pression of that love, charity and mercy ; for we 
cannot think of Him as capable of expressing any- 
thing else. When the poet says, 

'^ The angry sun on waste Sahara's plain 
Shone down, blasting all nature with its presence," 

we do not, in our poetic ardor, literally attribute 
to the sun a peculiar anger with the desert of 
Sahara above all other lands, under the influence 
of which it withers all attempts at herbage, and 
dries up ruthlessly each bubbling fount or stream. 
We know that it is but a poetical method of ex- 
pressing a fact resulting from the atmospheric and 
climatic conditions of that arid region. We know 
that it is the same sun which shines so beneficently 
on our own prolific land. He sends forth the same 
heat, and the same amount and kind, to America 
that he does to Sahara. But our position, and our 



The Curse, 97 

atmosplieric and climatic conditions are snch, that 
we receive his beams in luxuriant forms of verdure, 
while Sahara receives them in sterile sands. 

So with human minds. This sun of everlasting 
light, the Word of God, sends forth his beams of 
truth and love with equal force, to the grossest 
sensualist and the most exalted Christian. How 
they receive these beams, whether as a sterile 
desert or as a fertile garden, depends upon them- 
selves. Yet the light and heat as they come from 
their divine source, are the same for all. But as 
the same sun blasts in some climes and beautifies 
in others, according to the characteristics or con- 
dition of the region which receives it, so the same 
law of love that gives existence and life to all, if 
it is received in order and in answ^ering love, 
renders beautiful the soul of its recipient ; but if 
received in disorder and hate, its very power of 
giving life is turned into a means of death. 

It is on this principle that the divine gift of 
life received in innocence and joy, lived in its own 
spirit and reflected back to its Creator in perfect 
images, is, in the language of holy wTit, '' the 
blessing of the Lord ;'' but the same divine gift 
received in a selfish nature, lived in perverted 
form, and reflected back in hideous distortions, is, 
in the language of holy WTit, ''the curse of the 
Lord.'' How perfectly a mirror without any flaw 
or irregularity in its surface, reflects the human 
9 "^ G 



98 The Garden of Eden. 

countenance I But you have seen, perhaps, those 
mirrors which turn the human figure upside 
down, or distort every feature of the face. The 
original is perfect enough ; it is the reflection 
which is right or wrong. The divine original in 
the soul of man, is pure and upright. It is 
the use w^e make of our God-given faculties — 
the manner in which the soul receives and reflects 
the influent life, which renders it beautiful or 
monstrous in its proportion and form. 

Life given of the Lord, is a blessing to him who 
uses it aright, and a curse to him who perverts it. 
This is the blessing and the curse. It seems as 
if the latter w^ere of God, and the natural mind so 
views it. It really is of man ; and the spiritual 
mind reads of God's curse, as the poet reads of 
the angry sun. Each one reads according to his 
nature. But he who follows the Word of God in 
its spirit, thinks of the curse of the Lord as the 
angels think of it — as the divine mercy resting 
with man amid the very ruins of his nature, and 
rendering him as happy as possible in the dreary 
region of life he has sought and found. In other 
W' ords, God's curse is the divine law of life — a ruin 
and a wreck through man's perversity, but Divinity 
still working amid those ruins to save him from 
a worse desolation even on his chosen plane. 
Riches are a blessing to him who uses them aright, 
a curse to him who makes of them the mere instru- 



The Curse. 99 

ments of self-gratification. Health is a blessing 
to him who nobly works in its strength for life's 
elevation, a curse to him who uses it for the larger 
gratification of his love of sensual pleasure. Edu- 
cation is a blessing to him who develops by its 
means an enlarged capacity for usefulness, a curse 
to him who employs it to render himself a greater 
adept in crime. The great gift of life is a blessing 
to him who lives in true order according to the 
Divine intent, but a curse to him who inverts its 
heavenly purpose and makes it a means of mis- 
chief to the world. When, therefore, we read in 
the Word of God, of the Lord's blessings, v/e are 
to understand his gifts of good freely received 
and righteously applied or divinely lived; but 
when we read of his curses, we are to understand 
Ms good gifts misapplied and wickedly perverted 
to evil purposes and selfish ends. It is this style 
of Scripture from which poetry has borrowed 
its character, and of which it is a fair exponent 
oftener than matter-of-fact prose. 

Having thus enlarged upon the nature of the 
curse, let us take a rapid review of the spiritual 
meaning of that portion of the parable at which 
we have now arrived. The primitive church 
called Adam, having departed from its pristine 
innocence, having inclined to the selfhood or jjro- 
priicm, having been seduced by the serpent to 
eat of the tree of sense and science, trended 



100 The Garden of Edeyi. 

rapidly downward. Then it is said that "• the 
eyes of them both were opened, and they knew 
that they were naked." When it had been said, 
before the temptation, that '' they were both naked 
and not ashamed,'' it was, in the spiritual sense, 
a description of their innocence. In that innocent 
state there w^as nothing w^hereof they needed to 
be ashamed. Now, however, their eyes were 
opened ; but to what ? Why, to the things of 
self and sense, in a manner in which their fore- 
fathers by no means understood them. Their 
eyes were opened to see that they regarded self 
and the w^orld as the chief things in life, and 
spiritual things as matters of secondary impor- 
tance ; while their progenitors, in the wise inno- 
cence of their hearts, had regarded spiritual attain- 
ments as the grand purpose of life, and self and 
the w^orld as merely instrumental means toward 
this great end. So they saw their nakedness ; 
that is, they became aw^are that they w^ere un- 
clothed with spiritual principles, and, therefore, 
they sought to invest themselves with merely 
natural good. For, as the vine is the oft-repeated 
symbol of spiritual good, so the fig-tree is that of 
natural good. And this clothing the life with 
merely external or moral virtues, is corresponden- 
tially described in the statement that ^^ they sewed 
fig leaves together and made themselves aprons." 
Then ^^ they heard the voice of the Lord going 



The Curse. 101 

forth in the garden." The voice of the Lord is 
any inward dictate which emanates from Him. 
** Going forth " is the correct translation, not 
*' walking " as the authorized version has it. It 
was not the Lord walking in a natural garden, 
and speaking face to face with a man and woman. 
It was an inward dictate of conscience, the voice 
of the Lord, which those people experienced, 
going forth in the garden of the intelligence of 
which they were yet possessed, calling them to 
account for the wretched mistake they had made. 
So they ^' hid themselves from the face of the 
Lord ; " that is, they shut out the divine dictate 
and the divine countenance from their minds ; and 
they hid themselves among the trees of the garden, 
that is, they averted themselves from the Lord or 
his dictates by withdrawing into the perceptions of 
their own self-intelligence. 

It is the usual story, first enacted in the ancient 
garden. When man wants to do wrong, when 
he wants to be selfish, when he wants to gorge 
himself with worldly pleasure, the inward voice 
of the Lord forbids ; yet he turns from it, shuts 
out the voice that would counsel and correct — the 
voice of divine wisdom and virtue — and justifies 
himself by the delusive sophistry of his self-in- 
telligence. So did the people of the most ancient 
times. And w^hen they seriously sought to shut 
out the suggestions which the Lord would fain 
9* 



102 The Garden of Eden. 

make to mind and heart they brought the curse 
upon themselves. And then as an excuse for this, 
the reply was made by the proprium — the woman 
— to the conscience or the Lord's voice, '' The 
serpent beguiled me and I did eat ; '' meaning, 
^' The sensual principle of my nature has been 
too strong for me, and I have yielded to it because 
I could not resist its influence." The excuse, 
however, is but a lame one, and helps nothing. 
An effort to rise from the position into which they 
had fallen, had been far better than a mere excuse 
for their degradation. It was simply, however, 
what the man now does every day, who, while 
acknowledging the abstract holiness of the Lord's 
instructions, persists in saying, '' It is not possible 
for any one to keep the divine commandments.'' 
So the curse followed — the fault of man entirely, 
and not of the Lord. It was the consequence of 
departing from the true order of life, and not an 
arbitrary decree of God. It was the inherent 
demoralization caused by yielding to the pro- 
prium, and not an edict of divine wrath. 

^' And th3 Lord God said unto the serpent. 
Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed 
above all cattle and above every beast of the 
field." Let us constantly bear in mind that this 
whole narrative is an allegory. Nothing of it 
transpired as a literal conversation of the Lord 
with man, woman, or serpent. When it reads 



The Curse. 103 

that '^the Lord God said/^ it is meant that thus 
and so the Lord viewed the matter ; or, that thus 
and so is it in the light of divine truth. Each 
expression is the statement of a truth couched in 
correspondential language. Thus, in the Lord's 
view, or in the light of divine truth, the sensual 
principle or the serpent had become cursed ; and 
this above all the other affections of the mind, 
symbolized by the expression, "■ Above all cattle 
and above every beast of the field.'' It had so 
come to be cursed, in becoming the lowest, the 
most depraved, the most groveling, of all portions 
of human nature. Nothing is lower than sen- 
suality. Therefore it is said, '* Upon thy belly 
shalt thou go " — a significant statement of the 
gross, earthly, corporeal and bestial character of 
the sensual principle under the conditions to w^hich 
it had brought itself. It had been a good thing 
and spiritually erect when in its proper place, as 
a servant doing the bidding of the higher nature 
— an agent of the latter in its earthly work. But 
when it assumed to be master and seduced the 
mind and heart, erect no more it groveled on the 
lowest earthly plane. It ate or lived upon the 
mere dust and ashes of life, fed upon corporeal 
and terrestrial ideas and enjoyments. 

And another result of the curse, or the degrada- 
tion of the sensual nature, was expressed in the 
words, '^ I will put enmity between, thee and the 



104 The Garden of Eden. 

woman, and between thy seed and her seed.'' 
The woman, as we have before shown, represents 
the affectional nature. In this connection, as 
there is enmity between her and the serpent, and 
as she was the predestined symbol of the Church 
in its affectional or emotional aspect, it was a 
simple statement of the truth, that henceforth 
there would be war between the genuine affec- 
tion for spiritual things in the Church, and 
sensualism in all its forms. The seed of the 
serpent, or the final fruit of sensuality, was in- 
fidelity. The seed of the woman, or the wonder- 
ful issue which was to be born of the future 
Church, was Christ and Christianity. The enmity 
between the seed of the serpent and the seed of 
the w^oman, was a prophecy of the war to be 
inaugurated by infidelity — whether Jewish, pagan, 
or modern — in respect to Christ and his religion. 
Thus the seed of the serpent has bruised his heel, 
that is, the heel of Christ, both in the crucifixion 
of his body, and in his crucifixion in every heart 
which has burned with hatred towards Him and 
the relisrion He tauo-ht. And the seed of the 
woman has bruised the serpent's head in every 
victory, and on the arena of every heart where 
true Christianity has gained a triumph over the 
crafty seductions of infidelity. ^^ Unto the woman 
he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy 
conception ; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth 



The Curse, 105 

children ; and thy obedience (the true rendering) 
shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over 
thee.'' The woman is here, as in the former 
verse, the woman of prophecy ; she is the true 
Church in its affectional aspect ; she is the affec- 
tion for truth and goodness in the minds of the 
members of the Church. No allusion is here 
made to natural conceptions or births. That is 
the letter ; and the letter is only the basis, sym- 
bol, or correspondent of the spirit. The allusion 
is to those things which are born of spiritual 
affection, to all good feelings, desires and prompt- 
ings, to all new conceptions of truth, of salvation, 
of heaven, of the Lord. Again the prophecy is 
not of what the Lord does, although it is said, 
" I will multiply,'' etc. It is a statement of the 
inevitable consequence of human degradation and 
of the unavoidable condition which the human 
race takes on, in permitting itself to be degraded. 
Those consequences to the serpent or sensuous 
nature, we have seen. The consequences to the 
woman or the affectional nature, are here described. 
These have no relation to the conceptions and 
births of natural children. They are the nev/ 
conceptions of spiritual truth, and the new births 
of good desires, feelings and promptings. It is 
of these children of the soul that it is said, '^I 
will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy concep- 
tion ; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children." 



106 The Garden of Eden. 

In the Eden state all the faculties developed into 
good, naturally, without struggle, pain or sorrow. 
Now we emerge from natural states into spiritual, 
through much conflict, through dark temptations, 
through severe inward combats, through painful 
losses of things we had set our hearts upon, through 
many sighs and tears. Then truth came to the 
mind in lightning flashes, quick, clear and unmis- 
takable ; to hear spiritual truth, was to grasp it 
and believe it. Now we have to wrestle with it, 
reason about it, sometimes almost to agonize over 
it, in order to its reception. These children of the 
spiritual affections, are conceived in sorrow and 
brought forth through much affliction. It is part 
of the curse. It is the result of a fallen state. It 
is easy to descend ; but to reascend the mountain 
of the Lord, is a weary work indeed. It is added, 
*' Thy obedience shall be to thy husband, and he 
shall rule over thee.'^ 

The man or husband is the symbol of the intel- 
lect, as woman is of the will or affection. In true 
order the intellect is subordinate to the will. It is 
love for the Lord which renders the truths of the 
Lord clear. It is the love of the neighbor which 
teaches all life's proper duties. But another result 
of the curse is, that the will yields obedience to 
the intellect. And now in spiritual things we must 
retrace our steps. Now the intellect must acknowl- 
edge the Lord, before the heart will love Him ; the 



The Curse. 107 

reason must admit an act to be a duty, before we 
are willing to do it. It is the only way back to 
Eden. 

''And unto Adam he said/' This is the author- 
ized version, but a mistranslation. It should read, 
*' Unto the man (/s/i — the man male) he said, Be- 
cause thou hast hearkened unto thy wife ; " because 
thou, the once God-like intellect, hast listened to 
the suggestions of the proprium, ^' and hast eaten 
of the tree of which I commanded thee saying. 
Thou shalt not eat of it," that is, hast drawn the 
nourishment of thy soul from self and sense and 
science — '' cursed is the ground for thy sake" — 
miserable and wretched and degraded is thy mind ; 
*' in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy 
life ; " that is, with trouble and affliction, vexation 
and disappointment, sin and sorrow shalt thou pur- 
sue thy way, as the legitimate result of thy selfish 
life, so long as that state endures ; '' thorns and 
thistles shall it bring forth to thee ; " that is, evils 
and falsities shall be the fruits of thy mental con- 
dition ; *' and thou shalt eat of the herb of the 
field," — the smallest and least consequential of 
spiritual conception shall be thy mental food ; 
''in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, 
till thou return to the ground ; " that is, with dis- 
gust and loathing shalt thou receive the true bread 
of life offered thee by the Lord, until finally thou 
shalt fall back completely into thine earthly nature ; 



108 The Garden of Eden. 

'' for out of it thou wast taken," — out of the earthly 
nature the Lord lifted thee when He placed thee 
in Eden ; ^' for dust thou art," — in and of thyself 
mere spiritual dross; ''and to dust thou shalt re- 
turn," — by thine own act hast thou abased thyself, 
and art, therefore, self-condemned. 

And so the woman, the man and the serpent — 
the affection, the intellect and the sensual nature- 
all passed under the curse. Yet it was, on the part 
of the human race, an act of self-degradation. The 
Lord seems to say, '' I did it ; " but it was not the 
Lord's will, but his broken law that did it. And 
so mankind went down, down, until our God-in- 
Christ came to earth to raise him up again. 

Now the lesson here taught comes home to all 
of us. The curse is evil and sin, and it rests upon 
the hearts of all who cherish evil. It is self and 
sense, and it abides in every nature over which 
these twin deceivers hold sway. The woman and 
the man and the serpent are all in us. They are 
of every mind. Each one has his emotional, his 
intellectual and his sensual nature. In the Eden 
state, these are under the Divine influence ; in a 
fallen or perverted state, they are under the curse. 
All human degradation is self-imposed ; each curse 
that falls is self-originated. But the Lord comes 
down (if we will permit Him) into the midst of 
every sorrow, care or pain, and breathes his mercy 
there. The good Samaritan of the soul, He pours 



The Oarse. 109 

his oil of love into every wound. He turns, or 
constantly endeavors to turn, each sorrow into a 
balm for our healing, each pain into a cure for our 
hurts. And if we accept his mercy and his love, 
we rise and walk erect once more. 

Shall we not take comfort, then, amid the sad- 
dest of life's pictures ? Shall we not receive solace 
even when contemplating the ruins of fallen man ? 
We have looked down ; let us now look up and re- 
joice in the thought, that even so low as the human 
race has fallen, so high may it also rise. 
10 




VII. 

THE EXPULSION. 

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is 
become as one of us. to know good and evd : 
and now lest he put forth his hand, and take 
also of the tree of life, and eat, and I ire for- 
ever : therefore the Lord God sent him forth 
from the garden of Eden, to till the ground 
from whence he ^vas taken. So he drove 
out the man.— Gen. iii. 22, 23. 

j jpHE expulsion from Eden, viewed in its 
Pira mere surface sense, appears to have been 
a very arbitrary proceeding on the part of 
the Lord. Its cause seems to have been wholly 
inadequate, its consequences not legitimately 
growing out of the act, and the punishment out 
of all proportion to the crime. 

Let us take a supposed case. A father places 
his child in a garden where there are two kinds 
of fruit, each of them tempting to the eye and 
giving outward evidence of being luscious to the 
taste. The child is informed — without a w4iy or 
a w^herefore, but on the impulse of a mere whim 
and as a test of his implicit obedience — that he may 
eat of the one kind of fruit and not of the other. 
The declared conditions or consequences are : if 
he obeys he shall live, if not he shall die. It is a 
severe test, and the punishment altogether dispro- 

110 



The Expulsion. Ill 

portionate to the offence to w^hich it is annexed. 
The child, weak and ignorant, overcome by curi- 
osity and overpersuaded by foolish advisers, is led 
to believe that his father did not really mean what 
he said, and eats of the tree of which he is forbid- 
den to eat. Then the parent, entirely forgetful 
of the penalty he had imposed for disobedience, 
does not cause the child to die, but banishes him 
from his presence forever, to get his education 
and his living as best he may. He is to receive 
no more love, no more sympathy, no sign or 
shadow of mercy, from him who too severely 
tested him, and who was bound by every human 
consideration to lead him with a loving hand into 
wiser ways, instead of casting him off in his weak- 
ness, ignorance and error. 

What would vv e think of such a father ? Would 
we not consider him unjust, inhuman, heartless ? 
Even the law which is supposed to be devoid of 
sympathy and untempered by mercy, would com- 
pel the parent to step in and take his child in 
charge again. But the Lord is better than man, 
infinitely more kind, tender and loving. Would 
it be possible for Him to act toward his child in 
the way the letter of Genesis appears to teach ? 
How could He who, in the tender language of the 
Psalmist, is described as '^a God full of compas- 
sion and gracious, long-suffering and plenteous in 
mercy and truth," who is represented in the 



112 The Garden of Eden. 

Gospel as being ^' kind even unto the unthankful 
and the evil " — how could He be unjust, arbitrary, 
or cruel, devoid of love or forgetful of mercy 
toward even the most rebellious of his children ? 

When, therefore, v/e so read or interpret this 
narrative, accepfing the apparent for the real 
truth, we make a terrible mistake. We must not 
conclude with the infidel that God's Word is false. 
Rather let us conclude that we have been mistaken 
in our interpretation ; that our education or under- 
standing has been at fault ; and let us seek for an 
interpretation that will justify the character of 
God, and in so doing elevate our own minds. In 
reading the written Word we shall always come 
nearer the truth by rejecting the natural and 
seeking the spiritual meaning. For to all utter- 
ances of divine inspiration, our Lord's v/ords apply, 
''It is the spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh profit- 
eth nothing ; the words that I speak unto you, 
they are spirit and they are life." And the apostlo 
spoke in harmony with the Master's words, when 
he said with reference to Scripture, '' The letter 
killeth, but the spirit giveth life." 

We have come now to a point where we can 
clearly see this. In previous discourses we have 
treated this Eden history as an allegor}^ of spir- 
itual truth. We have looked beyond the letter ; we 
have not impaired the beauty or force of the nar- 
rative by literal interpretations, but have tried to 



The Expulsion^ 113 

reproduce its inward spirit and fill it with vigor- 
ous life. We have not looked upon it as literal 
history, but have endeavored to quicken it with 
that spirit wMth which the Lord gave it forth. 
Contrast the spiritual truth thus taught in this 
history viewed as a parable, wfth the most un- 
natural ideas which have been drawn from it as a 
literal historic narrative. An all- wise Father has 
created an earth upon which He places the family 
of man. He has made these children of his, on a 
finite scale, an image and likeness of what He is 
infinitely. That is. He has made them beings of love, 
innocence and goodness, and capable of indefinite 
degrees of spiritual wisdom. It is his desire that 
they should pass from this world, prepared for 
angelic habitations, and live in the highest happi- 
ness forever. He, therefore, may be considered as 
speaking to mankind after this manner : You are 
human because you are free ; and you are free 
moral agents because you are human. I cannot 
take away your freedom without reducing you to 
the grade of the beasts which perish. Now, I 
place before you heavenly food of every variety, 
the wisdom of a good life and the goodness of 
eternal wisdom; and partaking of the fruit of 
these, you will have eternal life. I am the source 
of all good. Draw your nourishment, your food 
for heart and mind, from me the great Tree 
of Life, and existence shall be to you exceeding 
10* H 



114 The Garden of Eden, 

blissful. Do this, and life is an Eden, a garden 
of joy to you ; and Eden is the bliss of heavenly 
life. But I place before you also the fact, that 
the life of self and sense is misery, degrada- 
tion and spiritual death. This is the forbidden 
tree. It is forbidden, not because I would de- 
prive you of any true good or pleasure, but be- 
cause this is evil and insanity and there is no 
good in it. I commend the heavenly fruit to you, 
because it nourishes the eternal life of your souls 
and places you in heaven forever. I forbid the 
fruit of self and sense, because it hinders your 
spiritual growth, makes you heirs of spiritual 
death, and unfits you for heaven. 

The contrast between this view of the narra- 
tive which is its spirit, and the other which is its 
letter, is marked. The Father is no longer arbi- 
trary or inhuman. He is tenderness exemplified. 
All is consonant with what our deepest readings 
of the Bible show his character to be. It is not 
the Lord who is tyrannical, but man who is will- 
ful ; not the Lord in anger shutting man out from 
happiness, but man shutting himself out by his 
own willfulness. And all this, as we have seen, 
is told, and in no ambiguous manner, in the sym- 
bolic language of this ancient parable. 

But it is said: ''Therefore the Lord God sent 
him forth from the garden ; '^ and, it is added : 
*' So he drove out the man.'^ This is the peculiar 



The Expulsion. 115 

style of all divine writings. It is so given with 
a purpose. Some of the common expressions of 
our day are similarly fashioned and for the same 
purpose. The old sayings '' The sun rises/' and 
*' The sun goes down/' are familiar illustrations. 
These phrases have come down to us from a people 
whose system of astronomy was all false, and 
who believed that the sun literally moved around 
the earth in twenty-four hours ; that at the end 
of each day it sunk below the horizon ; and that 
at the end of each night it rose again on the 
eastern side. That is the appearance, but it is 
not the reality. We all now know that the earth 
revolves upon its own axis in the twenty-four 
hours, and turns us in its movement toward and 
away from the sun. Yet this language of ap- 
pearance, in this and many other instances that 
might be mentioned, remains unchallenged. Chil- 
dren and ignorant people are permitted to use it 
with a mistaken idea attaching to it, because they 
could not understand the truth if explained to 
them. But the educated are in no wise deceived 
or misled thereby, using themselves the same ex- 
pressions, with a full conception of the true doc- 
trine which lies within or behind this language 
of appearance ; and the same children who, as 
children, accepted the apparent for the genuine 
truth, slowly and unconsciously, through educa- 
tion, come at last to connect only the real truth 



116 The Garden of Eden. 

with the same language. The language of ap- 
pearance, so large an element in the formulated 
^expressions of conversation, is adapted to children 
and adults, to the ignorant and wise. It is the 
highest conception, fallacious as it may be, of 
infantile innocence and ignorance ; yet it is, to 
manhood and education, only the apparent form 
which clothes realities. 

The Lord, in his dealings with men, follows 
what is sometimes termed the methods of nature. 
And what are the methods of nature but the 
Lord's own methods? The Bible was given to 
the Jews who were merely natural men incapable 
of spiritual ideas. It is read to-day by millions 
of merely natural men. It is and has been and 
will forever be read by countless generations of 
children. It is intended that the natural minded, 
the superstitious, the spiritually uneducated and 
children, shall abide in the appearance until they 
can accept the realit}^ It is better for them to 
believe that the Lord chastises, that He is angry 
with us when we do wrong, that He sends us to 
hell, that He deprives us of heaven, that He 
drives the disobedient out of Eden, than that they 
should not recognize Him at all. The appearance 
of truth in regard to God, is better than a denial 
of Him. An acknowledgment of Him in an er- 
roneous way, is better than no acknowledgment. 
We ascend to the temple of wisdom by steps ; and 



21ie Expulsion, 117 

the lowest step, be it never so rugged or soiled 
by earthly dust, is a foothold by means of which 
we mount to the higher. 

Our Lord recognizes this. Therefore the Bible 
is a series of parables replete with spiritual 
wisdom. Its seeming is for natural men and 
children. Its real spirit is for spiritual men and 
women, and those desiring to be spiritual. The 
child may say, ^^ God punishes me if I am 
wicked ; " the natural man may think that the 
Lord drives men out of Eden for their disobe- 
dience ; but the higher thought sees in the phrase, 
*' The Lord drove out the man,'' simply an ex- 
pression of the consequences which inhere in his 
own act. Eden was innocence, love and true 
happiness. When man ceased to love, he was 
out of Eden ; when he was no longer innocent, 
he was no longer in Eden ; when he did not enjoy 
the love of the Lord, nor the purity of purpose, 
nor the peculiar happiness which constituted Eden, 
and of which the term itself was a synonym, then 
he left Eden. That is to say, as Eden is a state 
and not a place, his departure from that state, by 
the very act of departure, put him outside of the 
garden. 

The natural sense reveals the Lord to natural 
men as the punisher of disobedience. The spirit- 
ual sense manifests, to those Vv^ho think spiritually, 
the great law of the fall, as being in man's own 



118 The Garden of FAen. 

departure from the true and good. Therefore the 
Lord drove out the man in the same sense that 
the sun sends darkness on the world. For as the 
earth rolls itself away from the sunlight and 
plunges us into darkness, so the mind turns itself 
away from the Lord and his influence, and in so 
doing goes forth from Eden. Thus was it, and 
thus only, that Adam or the w^orld's first Church, 
and Eve or the selfhood to which that Church had 
become wedded, were driven from the garden. 
They went to no other natural place, they re- 
mained, as to natural locality, just where they 
were. But they fell or went into a lower state, a 
more and more sensual and selfish state, a state 
to which nothing celestial adhered, and which 
could not in any proper sense be called Eden ; and 
in that state they remained. 

Let us now glance at another law of Providence 
which is set forth under the correspondences in 
the parable. It seems strange to natural thought, 
that the reason given for man's being sent forth 
from the Garden of Eden was, '' lest he put forth 
his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, 
and live forever." Was it not the very purpose 
of the Lord that he should eat of this sacred tree ? 
Why then send him from the garden lest he should 
eat of it ? The answer is found in the symbols 
already so often explained. 

Eden is a state of love ; a garden, a state of 



The Expulsmi. 119 

spiritual intelligence. The expression, Garden of 
Eden, is, however, used with a modified meaning 
according to the position in the parable in which 
it occurs. The primitive state of man was such, 
that his Garden of Eden was a spiritual intelli- 
gence evolved from his intense love of God. But 
w^hen he fell from this high state, and became in 
love with self and the things of sense, he still re- 
tained much of his knowledge, yea, acknowledg- 
ment of spiritual things. So his Garden of Eden 
would now be an intelligence concerning spiritual 
things based upon what had been handed down 
from his forefathers, a tradition concerning the 
love state, but not an experience of it. For we 
must remember that we are tracing the spiritual 
fall of a race through its centuries of decadence. 
The present generation had much more of an 
intellectual assent than of an experimental knowl- 
edge of the wisdom of Eden. 

But as we learn from various other portions of 
the Word, to acknowledge truth, and not to be in 
the effort to live in the light of the truth acknowl- 
edged, is profanation. It is more soul-destroying 
than any other state. To give a formal assent to 
spiritual truth without an inward acknowledg- 
ment, to have a parrot-like memory of phrases 
without an adequate conception of their meaning, 
and in neither case to live by them, is compara- 
tively pardonable : no one can live up to what he 



120 The Garden of Men, 

does not intelligently comprehend. But to receive 
God's law intelligently, and deliberately break it 
— to accept in the understanding the law of love, 
and make no effort to bring it forth into life — 
demoralizes the soul and is spiritually ruinous. 
Better ignorance, better utter darkness, better 
anything that sins in blindness and perverts the 
Lord's law with no knowledge of its existence, 
than an intelligent conception of its behests and a 
willful violation of them. By a willful violation, 
I do not mean the slips which the carnal man is 
always liable to make, but the deliberate sinning 
from the pure love of sin, and without an effort 
to overcome, while the man interiorly acknowl- 
edges the true nature of the higher life. 

Therefore it was according to the Lord's provi- 
dence that man should entirely lose his intelligence 
concerning spiritual things, rather than acknowl- 
edge and profane them ; that he should not only 
go forth from Eden, or the love state, since so he 
would, but that he should also be driven out from 
the garden — the spiritually intelligent state. The 
hand is a symbol of power, as it is man's chief 
agent in performing the behests of his will. To 
put forth the hand, here means to exert the intel- 
lectual powers of the mind. To take of the tree 
of life, is to acknowledge the doctrine of love, and 
the Lord as its source. To eat is mentally to di- 
gest and confirm it. And to live forever, is to 



The Expulsion. 121 

live hereafter and to all eternity the life of the 
proprium, which is that of spiritual death. For 
while to live refers to heavenly life when that is 
the subject treated of, it means infernal life, when 
the soul is driven forth from Eden. 

Thus when the Lord said, '' Behold the man is 
become as one of us, to know good and evil ; '^ that 
is, when He, in his infinite knowledge, perceived 
that mankind had eaten of the forbidden fruit, and 
yet had retained their acknowledgment of the laws 
of heavenly life approved of the Lord and held by 
his angels (it is plural, "■ one of us ''), then came 
into play one of the eternal provisions of Provi- 
dence. That provision is, that when the human 
mind falls into spiritual degradation, it shall lose 
its power of seeing or understanding spiritual 
truth. To profane is to sink into the lowest 
depths of evil ; to sin without profanation of the 
truth, is comparatively pardonable. This is in 
consonance with that teaching of our Lord, which 
says : ^' That servant which knew his Lord's will, 
and prepared not himself, neither did according to 
his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But 
he that knew not, and did commit things worthy 
of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes." 
For the merciful Lord, rather than have willful 
disobedience, has so ordered the laws of mind, 
that the supreme love of self shall be attend- 
ed by loss of the capacity to recognize the love 
11 



122 lite Garden of Eden. 

of God; and that a purely sensuous life shall 
incapacitate one to perceive the light of heaven. 
We see the operations of this law all the world 
over. And now that man has gone forth from 
Eden, none are permitted to see the light except 
those who will endeavor to live by the light. In 
our present low condition we may fail to live in 
all respects as the truth requires. But this is not 
the unpardonable sin. If we want to get into the 
sunlight of the Lord, and to rise above our evils, 
knowledge is given us adapted to our states ; and 
the wanting and seeking is a sign that at some 
time we shall gain what we desire. 

So, as the Eden of love faded from the hearts of 
men, the light of spiritual intelligence flickered 
in its departing struggle, and at last went out. 
Then the garden state was gone. And forth from 
the garden of Eden — forth from love and even 
spiritual knowledge — our early progenitors went. 
They went forth to ''till the ground '^ — to culti- 
vate the lowest part of their nature ; '' to till the 
ground from whence they were taken," to culti- 
vate the sensuous plane on which the race was 
originally born, but from which untainted as yet 
by hereditary evil, the Lord had raised them into 
Eden. 

But the Spirit of the Lord is ever operating for 
the salvation of man. There is no state of the 
heart into which it may not enter if man will per- 



The Expulsion. 123 

mit it. To him who looks to the Lord, the light 
again comes. The more he looks to the Lord, the 
larger will become his intelligence. But the full 
comprehension of divine truths, the living percep- 
tion which renders them certain and gives us an 
unquestioning possession of them, lies in the love 
and life of them. 

It is well for us to think of this portion of 
Scripture as something more, even in its symbols, 
than a historical description of the first dwellers 
on earth. We lose the best part of it, unless we 
take it all home. We have hearts and under- 
standings as well as thej of old. We have 
our Eden, our tree of life, our forbidden fruit, as 
well as they. We, too, incline to self and are 
tempted to our fall. Our Eden, however, is our 
infancy. Then the best of the Lord's angels are 
around and near us, and we are guileless, pure and 
innocent. It is a different condition from that of 
the most ancient Church ; still it is our Eden. As 
we grow older we incline to self. The hereditary 
proclivity is strong, and we lean to our corrupt 
inheritance. We incline to be wedded more and 
more to the j^'^opriiim or selfhood, and take to 
ourselves some Eve of selfish affection in a thou- 
sand different w^ays. The serpent comes to us, 
and we listen to his subtle arguments, and yield 
our reason to his seductive allurements. The 
history of all hearts is substantially the same. 



124 The Garden of Eden. 

Manhood or womanhood finds us infatuated with 
the serpent. We are driven out of Eden. Yet 
there is this to console us, that so long as we live 
on earth we are privileged to return. 

It is for the purpose of reading our own heart- 
histories, that these parables are valuable. For 
that, they are of inestimable worth ; but they are 
valueless to us in the degree they fail of that. For 
in these chapters, whatever they may tell of the 
olden times, our hearts are also laid bare for our 
own inspection. When we read them for spiritual 
instruction, angels quicken us to love them. They 
infuse the desire to shun the wrong and do the 
right. Thus we come into communion with an- 
gelic minds ; we breathe in some degree the atmos- 
phere of heaven ; we fall in some measure under 
the influence thus infused ; we grow better and 
wiser ; we gain more light and life ; and this 
divine Word shall do more for us, as we better 
comprehend its spirit and meaning, than men in 
the past have, in their most hopeful states, dreamed 
of. If we love this Word, let us not imagine that 
we may safely be indifferent to its higher purpose. 
If we reverence it, let us not be content with its 
lower or sensuous meaning. If we have caught 
one glimpse of its heavenly spirit, let us take it to 
our hearts and fill our souls with its delights, and 
in its every utterance try — as we are trying in this 
history of the planting and loss of Eden — to read 



Tlie Expulsion. 



125 



therein of our own changes and chances, and to 
gain therein the help of the Lord and his angels, 
to arise like the prodigal and return to the soul's 
true home — the garden of the Lord. 
11^ 




VIII. 

THE FLAMING SWORD, 

And he placed at the east of the garden 
of Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword 
which turned every way, to keep the way 
of the tree of life.— Gen. iii. 24. 

f'^HERE is no o^rander subject of contempla- 
^'f3 tion than that of the providence of God. 
^^^^^^i^ People are not indisposed, on great and 
extraordinary occasions, especially when they have 
been mysteriously saved from sudden disaster, to 
admit the existence of a supreme Power turning 
away evil from their path. But that is a very 
limited view of an illimitable subject. The gran- 
deur of the Lord's providence lies in its univer- 
sality. When we think of it as special in the 
sense of being uncommon, we limit its operations. 
Under such circumstances there is always mingled 
with our acknowledgment of the Lord's goodness, 
too much of the feeling that we have been singled 
out to receive a peculiar token of his favor. Awe 
and egoism are mingled in proportions too nearly 
equal, to render the sentiment one of the highest 
type of spirituality. It is not always easy to sep- 
arate the feeling of pride in being specially favored 
of God, from that resulting from a humble recog- 
nition of his protecting hand. That we believe 

126 



The Flaming Sword. 127 

ourselves to be humble does not alter the case. 
The mind under the control of human weakness, 
may deem itself humble when the Lord knows it 
is proud ; and this, because of the fact which too 
few recognize, that the heart may be proud of its 
own humility. Herein lies the danger of a belief 
in special providences of which we imagine that 
we have been the favored recipients more than 
others. 

But when we contemplate the Lord's providence 
as universal in its character, this danger ceases. 
The first view is narrow ; this is as broad as the 
universe itself. The first brings within its pur- 
view the self-6onscious principle -^ this loses sight 
of one's self, except as a mere drop in the ocean 
of humanity. Under its influence the mind says : 
The infinite Father loves the whole universe of 
men as well as He does me. The care that I 
receive, every one receives. The eye that was 
watching my way in saving me from disaster, 
is no less watchful over the goings of each indi- 
vidual among the countless myriads of the uni- 
verse. The mercy which hovers over me, is 
immanent in all the wide domain of human life, 
everywhere operative, everywhere alike tender 
and loving. 

In this thought there is genuine humility. I 
thus become only one of a vast brotherhood. No 
matter what happens to me, I am neither a pecu- 



128 The Garden of Eden, 

liarly favored nor neglected one. Therefore, 
whether we live on this side of the great ocean or 
the other, whether on the earth or on one of the 
other planets, whether in this solar system or in 
any other of the myriads which dot the starry 
heavens, we are all momentarily watched over, 
guided and guarded by the omnipresent All- 
Father. 

True, we cannot comprehend infinity ; that is, 
we cannot fully comprehend how the knowledge 
of the Lord can embrace things so minute, or his 
presence extend so far. This is one of the sub- 
jects which is beyond our mental grasp. The 
child fails to comprehend many things which, as 
a man, he sees quickly and clearly. We are un- 
able while in the flesh, to see the why of many 
things which, in the other world, will be simple 
and plain to us. One of the great delights of men 
who become angels, will be the constant broaden- 
ing of their mental horizon, and the ever-enlarging 
power of their mental grasp. 

We shall get nearer to this question of how the 
Lord can supervise the most minute affairs, only 
as our spiritual understanding develops and our 
experiences multiply. If we never come into it 
fully, it will be because we are not gods, and none 
but the Divine can fully comprehend the infinite 
operations of the Supreme Mind. Yet we can 
feel its influence ; we can know its truth ; we can 



The Flaming Sword, 129 

recognize the laws of Providence ; and we can 
grow beneath their invigorating presence. The 
sun shines upon us and warms and enlightens us 
none the less, although we may not be able to 
analyze his substance, and have no knowledge of 
how his beams are conveyed to us through such 
immense space. So the Lord loves us all, sees us 
all, and is present in every least act of our lives, 
although we cannot, with our finite minds, fully 
grasp the idea of the possibility of the infinite 
operations of his providence. 

Little as is the universality of the Lord's 
presence and providence recognized among men, 
it is one of the most positively announced teach- 
ings of Scripture. The Psalmist declares it in 
the words, '' Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? 
or whither shall I flee from thy presence ? If I 
ascend up into heaven, thou art there ; if I make 
my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take 
the wings of the morning and dwell in the utter- 
most parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand 
lead me and thy right hand shall hold me '' (Ps. 
vii. 7, 8, 9). Jeremiah proclaims it in the divine 
interrogation, '^ Can any hide himself in secret 
places that I shall not see him ? saith the Lord. 
Do not I fill heaven and earth ? saith the Lord '^ 
(xxiii. 24). And our Lord, when on earth, re- 
iterated the same truth in the declaration: ^' Are 
not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not 

I 



130 The Garden of Eden. 

one of them is forgotten before God ? But even 
the very hairs of our head are all numbered. 
Fear not, therefore, ye are of more value than 
many sparrows " (Luke xii. 6, 7). The five 
sparrows worth only two farthings, are very 
small things for the Lord to remember. The 
hairs of the head are very small things to be 
counted by God. But if even these are under 
his immediate observation, surely man must be. 
This was a doctrine that no follower of Christ 
must deny. So He referred them to the birds of 
the air, which sow not, neither reap nor gather 
into barns. He pointed to the lilies of the field, 
which neither toil nor spin. Yet the birds are 
bountifully fed, and the lilies are beautifully 
clothed, by Him who is the Father of all. Since 
each lily and bird, in each moment of its little 
life, is watched so carefully by the Lord's prov- 
idence, who shall say that the least of men, in 
the least act or event of his life, is forgotten by 
Him? 

Such is the divine truth. And the Christian 
who does not recognize this divine care in each 
and every least affair of each and every human 
life, is not penetrated by the philosophy of Jesus. 
And the Christian who does not know that this 
doctrine is universally recognized in Scripture as 
a central truth, has scarcely taken his first lesson 
in the teachings of Christ or his religion. 



The Flaming Sword. 131 

Now when the early race of mankind, called 
Adam, had departed from the state of purity, 
love, intelligence and happiness, denominated the 
Garden of Eden ; when, by becoming sensual and 
selfish they had lost or been driven out of that 
glorious state of which Eden was the symbol and 
synonym ; then the providence of God, ever mer- 
ciful and loving — the same providence which mak- 
eth his sun to rise on the evil and on the good 
alike, and sendeth his rain equally on the just and 
on the unjust, followed them out of Eden and into 
banishment. 

Providence is not only in heaven ; it is also in 
hell. It not only gives good to the good, but it 
restrains the evil from evil. It has no resentments, 
no wounded pride, no human passion. It works 
for all men, and for their greatest good and happi- 
ness. In Eden or out, it will do for each one that 
which will make him the best and happiest man it 
is possible for him to be on his own chosen plane. 
In Eden its ministries are ineffably tender and 
sweet. Out of Eden they do not seem so, only 
because they flow into perverted hearts and minds. 
Yet, even there, it will so modify and control cir- 
cumstances, not infringing human freedom, as to 
lead man to be as good as he is willing to be, and 
to withhold him as far as possible from sinking 
into lower depths of iniquity. 

This providence of the Lord is represented by 



132 The Garden of Eden. 

the cherubim. The cherubim, as known in ancient 
symbolism, were figures with human faces, out- 
spread^ wings, and bodies either animal or human. 
They are nowhere specifically described in Scrip- 
ture, so that their exact form is matter of specu- 
lation. But the figures exhibited for cherubim in 
the pictures of the old masters — infant faces wdth 
wings attached — find no w^arrant in the Bible. 
From what is there said, we know, at least, that 
they were perfect though mingled figures ; and 
that so far from being ludicrous, as tradition would 
make them, they were sublime in conception and 
beautiful in form. The cherubim are frequently 
mentioned in holy Writ, never, however, as a race 
of supernatural beings, as has sometimes been 
imagined, but ahvays as symbols. 

To mention but a single instance. It was com- 
manded that cherubim should be placed on the 
mercy seat over the ark, over the curtains of the 
tabernacle, over the vail and also in the temple, to 
signify that the Lord had them all in his keeping; 
that He watched over them continually ; that in 
all the wanderings and wars of Israel, wherever 
they went and wherever they stayed, his unwearied 
charge over them never relaxed. 

But all these things — the ark which contained 
the Ten Commandments, the mercy seat upon 
w^hich the cherubim stood, the curtains, the vail, 
the tabernacle and temple themselves, mere forms 



The Flaming Sicord. 133 

and containants, as they were, of outward wor- 
ship — were symbolic of the various things of in- 
ternal and spiritual worship yet to be developed 
in the Christian Church. 

But Christian worship in its highest sense is 
-Christian life. Thus the sublime truth was figured 
forth in these as representatives, that the provi- 
dence of the Lord broods, as it were, with beaming 
countenance and watchful eyes and outstretched 
wings, over every human life and heart, in all its 
worship, ways and wanderings. The face of the 
cherub was representative of the Lord's love and 
circumspection ; the body, of his power and pres- 
ence ; the outstretched wings, of his having them, 
after the beautiful similitude of the birds with their 
young, under his overshadowing and tender care ; 
its standing on the mercy seat, the constant pres- 
ence of the Lord in all human affairs with infinite 
compassion, gentleness and love. 

As, therefore, the cherubim are referred to in 
all other portions of the- Word as symbolic forms 
only, and not as supernatural beings, so must it 
have been in Genesis. In the description of the 
tabernacle and temple with their furniture and 
worship, we have an account of things actually 
made and once historically existent. The cheru- 
bim were beautifully carved figures placed in the 
positions to which they were assigned by divine 
command as representative of spiritual things, 
12 



134 The Garden of Eden. 

But in the narrative of Eden we have pure alle- 
gory, with little if any historical basis of literal 
fact. Yet the cherubim here have the same mean- 
ing. Their insertion into the divine allegory was 
for the purpose of shadowing forth the doctrine 
of an immediate and universal Providence. It 
was not intended to indicate that any particular 
race of supernatural beings were detailed, like the 
picket guards of an army, to protect the natural 
spot where stood the sacred tree* of life. But it 
was designed to convey the lesson of an ever- 
watchful Providence. It teaches it on the same 
principle and after the same manner as did the 
outspread wings and heavenly countenance which 
covered over and looked down upon the ark of the 
covenant. It kept the way of the tree of life by 
preventing the vicious, the sensual, and the selfish 
from understanding the doctrine of love, from 
appreciating the wisdom of a holy life, and from 
knowing the exquisite nature of Eden's happi- 
ness ; lest, understandings appreciating and know- 
ing, they should profane them, and thereby seal 
for themselves a yet more bitter doom. 

And the cherubim still guard the tree of life. 
It is the same to-day, and so will always be. The 
profane cannot see God ; the earthly have no 
relish for heavenly joy ; the intensely selfish do 
not believe in disinterestedness ; the grossly im- 
pure contend that purity of heart does not exist ; 



The Flaming Sword. 135 

the sensual admit not for a moment any wisdom 
that lifts one's view above the senses. The 
materialist is chained to matter ; the heathen ac- 
knowledges no Christ ; the idolater is joined to 
his idols. Brutalism and barbarism have no idea 
what spirituality means ; if they make pretence 
of being converted, they accept the name of Chris- 
tianity only, but do not get the real thing. The 
Lord's providence allows no man to receive more 
or higher truth than he is prepared to live. We 
w^onder at the slow progress of the nations from 
h^atTienism to Christianity ; it is the cherubim 
guarding the way of the tree of life. We wonder 
that so few accept the higher views of Christianity 
revealed by the Lord through Swedenborg ; again 
it is the cherubim guarding the way of the tree 
of life. The heathen will be converted to Chris- 
tianity, and Christians will accept more spiritual 
views of our religion, as they are seen in the 
Lord's providence to be ready, at least, to try to 
enter into its spirit and life. 

But the cherubim, or Providence and its minis- 
tries, w^ill hasten slowly in spite of the unrest of 
man. The tree of life will be guarded from prof- 
anation for men's own benefit, until they can 
safely take of it, and eat of its fruit without 
danger of profanation. And though we may be 
nominal Christians, or nominal receivers of the 
higher views of Christian truth, lip-service is not 



136 The Garden of Eden. 

necessarily heart-service, nor is outward pro- 
fession always accompanied by inward percep- 
tion. And with lips overflowing with creeds, and 
memories stored with formulated statements of 
the highest truths, men may still imagine them- 
selves to be eating of the tree of life, while the 
cherubim stand, with mercy and love, between 
them and this sacred tree, lest really partaking of 
its fruit they should profane. 

For the purpose of the allegory, a more strictly 
literal rendering of the Hebrew text is preferable 
to that of the authorized version. A high 
authority renders it thus : "■ And he [the Lord] 
made cherubim from the east to dwell at the 
Garden of Eden, and the flame of a sword turn- 
ing itself to keep the way of the tree of life." 
The east is the symbol of the peculiar dwelling- 
place of the Lord, thus of the Lord himself. 
What is from the east is from the Lord ; what is 
in the east is spiritually near to the Lord. He 
who faces the east, faces the Lord ; that is, in his 
heart he looks to the Lord. So the Lord made 
cherubim from the east, that is, a providence 
which is peculiarly his own or from Himself, to 
dwell, or b^ perpetually operative, at the entrance 
of the Eden of the heart, to keep the way of the 
tree of life, and preserve it from profanation. 

But there was another provision of Providence 
to this end, expressed in the correspondential 



The Flaming Sicord. lo7 

language of the text. There was, to use the 
more exact version above given, '' the flame of a 
sword turning itself, to keep the way of the tree 
of life.'' Had this been a literal garden and its 
sacred tree a literal tree, one would imagine that 
its obliteration from the earth were sufficient 
without literal guards or the flame of a literal 
sword. But as Eden is the state of celestial love 
and intelligence, and the tree of life, the Lord 
as their source and supply, spiritual provision is 
needed to keep from its sacred precincts the sen- 
sual and profane until they are prepared to par- 
take of its fruit without profaning. Everywhere 
in the Word of the Lord, the burning lusts of un- 
regeneral;e hearts are likened to fire and flame. The 
flames of hell are but the blazing fires of self-love, 
of passion and pride, enmity and envy, gluttony 
and debauchery, whatever burns in infernal breasts. 
Whatever is of self or self-derived intelligence, 
flames up as from a furnace of lust within the 
heart, whenever it is stirred into activity. 

The sword, in the symbolism of the Word, is 
used to denote the divine truth, which, keen- 
edged and polished in the hands of him who 
knows how to wield it, cuts its way through 
error and delusion, and destroys, in its victorious 
progress, the sophistries of sensuous reason and 
the armies of infernal persuasions. But in its 
opposite sense it is the symbol of falsity warring 
12^ 



138 The Garden of Eden. 

against truth and good. This is its meaning here. 
The flame of a sword turning itself, is self-love 
blazing forth with its false persuasions, and turn- 
ing every way for strength and confirmation. For 
when self-love with its attending satellites, evils 
of every kind, once finds permanent lodging within 
the heart, it soon persuades that heart that all is 
right. It turns in every direction or to every 
method of reasoning, to confirm the man in his 
• chosen position. No falsity is too false for its 
purpose ; no turning from truth can turn too far 
to accomplish its end ; and no rankling lust of 
self-love can flame too high or burn too brightly 
to gratify its passion. 

Now self-love flaming with false persuasions, is 
used by Providence as one of the most efficient 
guards to keep the way of the tree of life. The 
object sought is, that wicked minds shall not in- 
teriorly comprehend the life and love of God. 
This is for two reasons : One, as we have shown, 
is, that to interiorly comprehend and yet to live in 
willful disobedience, is profanation — the one un- 
pardonable sin. The sin is unpardonable, how- 
ever, not through lack of mercy in the Lord, but 
through its so searing the soul as to leave it in 
spiritual ruin. The other is, that a confirmed love 
of evil, with a knowledge of the full measure of 
happiness lost, would, to the spirit who has sunk 
beyond recovery, be everlasting misery. 



The Flaming Sword. 139 

Now hell exists because men have chosen wick- 
edness ; yet there is mercy there. God is mercy 
itself, and He descends not into hell with inverted 
nature. Where there is no reform there is no 
endless torture. But an appreciation of heavenly 
joy and an eternal knowledge of an everlasting 
loss of bliss like this, would be unceasing pain. A 
conscience forever torturing itself over what might 
have been, having a constant and realizing convic- 
tion of its loss, would be unremitting agony. A 
devil is a devil because he has lost his apprecia- 
tion of love, of heaven and of heavenly bliss ; — 
because his conscience is blasted through willful 
and continual sin. 

So the flame of the sword turning itself in the 
heart, self-love and sensualism flaming with false 
persuasions, keeps man back from reaching for the 
tree of life and profaning its fruit ; and this, 
because self-love does not appreciate the tree of life, 
deeming the fruit of the forbidden tree in all re- 
spects infinitely superior to it. It is only as self- 
love ceases to be itself, and that the love of God 
and good takes its place, that the joy of Eden and 
heaven is seen and sought. But after death, 
when conscience is lost and evil is become the 
rooted love of the soul, the happiness of heaven is 
a thing impossible to be known ; and if approached 
it is felt as something repulsive and painful. 

So no devil could seek to enter the Eden of the 



140 The Garden of Eden. 

other world either to disturb its inhabitants or 
profane its life, because self-love turns him in- 
stinctively away. He is happier elsewhere. It 
is, from a heavenly point of view, a wretched kind 
of happiness ; nevertheless it is his, and the merciful 
Lord would keep all as happy as He can. So the 
flame of the sword which turns itself, is made to 
keep the way of the tree of life. So Providence 
protects man's Eden everywhere, and the very 
best is done for all. 

Such is the lesson of the text. It teaches a 
doctrine that justifies the Avays of God with man. 
He is infinite mercy and love in all his appoint- 
ments and doings. He is tender with the meanest 
human being that forfeits the sublime destiny for 
which he was created. He is always with us all. 
He goes with us everywhere. He sympathizes 
with every noble aspiration and heroic struggle. 
He tries to turn our errors into wise and useful 
lessons. If we sink into self. He follows us with 
healing balms for every wound. If we sink 
beyond recall, He softens even the saddest fall. 
If we rise toward heaven, He bears us up Avith 
tender hands. If we throw ourselves into his 
loving arms. He will hold us there forever. The 
cherubim spread their broad protecting wings 
over all, and even the flame of the turning sword 
has its lesson of love. 



IX. 



THE RESTORATION. 

And he showed me a pure river of water 
of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of 
the throne of God and of the Lamb. In 
the midst of the street of it, and on either 
side of the river, was there the tree of life, 
which bare twelve manner of fruits, and 
yielded her fruit every month; and the 
leaves of the tree iverefor the healing of 
the nations. . . . Blessed are they that do 
his commandments, that they may have 
nght to the tree of life, and may enter in 
through the gates into the city.— Rev. xxii. 
1, 2, 14. 



<F^ 



^jT^S'the Word of God, in recording the spir- 
Wfe^ itual history of man, begins by placing him 
*^'^^^-^ in the Garden of Eden, so it ends by restor- 
ing him to that beautiful dwelling-place from 
whence, through sin, he was driven. Eden' is 
the first blessing and the last promise which the 
Lord ofters to man. It is the alpha and the omega, 
the beginning and the end, of the divine alphabet 
of human holiness. It embraces all things de- 
lightful and pleasant, all things wise and true, 
all things loving and good, all things innocent 
and pure. But as the Lord looks especially to 
man's eternal good and not to his temporal suc- 
cess — to that other world. whieh is spiritual and 
whose joys are unending, and not to this which 

141 



142 The Garden of Eden. 

is natural and whose pleasures are transient — it is 
evident that the blessings which Eden comprises 
must be of a spiritual and not of a worldly char- 
acter. This realm is no Mohammedan paradise 
of beautiful houris, delicious perfumes, voluptuous 
music, and other sensual delights. It is that gen- 
erous, pure and holy state of the soul which rests 
in the Lord, which takes home to the heart the 
spiritual life that He has taught, and which finds 
its chief pleasure and delight in doing good. 

We fully understand, now, that Eden is a state 
of the soul and not a natural locality. Were it 
not so, we could not approach the closing chapter 
of Scripture with any just appreciation of its 
meaning. Like the great I AM who is the only 
God, and yet is called by many names, Jehovah, 
Jesus, Christ or Lord, Adonai or Immanuel, so, 
in a large sense, there is only one spiritual home 
for man, although it is referred to or spoken of 
in Scripture under many names. In Isaiah it 
is called Hephzibah, the Lord's delight, and also 
Beulah, the married land. In many places it is 
called Jerusalem, sometimes Zion ; Jesus preached 
it as the kingdom of heaven ; John described it as 
the holy city, New Jerusalem, descending out of 
heaven from God. But it is introduced in the 
early chapters of Genesis as the Garden of Eden 

Now all these expressions are typical of a spir- 
itual state of the Church or of man. True, Zion 



The Restoration. 143 

and Jerusalem were literal localities ; but they are 
used as the symbols of interior states of purity, 
wisdom and love. The restoration of Zion and 
Jerusalem so often described under glowing im- 
agery, is but the restoration of Eden under another 
name. It is not natural cities in their pride of 
numbers and outward glory concerning which the 
Lord is solicitous, so much as it is a spiritual state 
of his Church. The kingdom of heaven which 
Jesus preached, and into w^hose courts He invited 
his followers, was only Eden again under another 
name. It was a thing of the heart, and He so 
distinctly stated. ''Neither,'' said He, ''shall ye 
say, Lo, here ! or Lo, there ! for behold, the king- 
dom of God is within you." Charts could not 
place it nor geographies describe it, for it was of 
the spirit. And, given this kingdom of heaven 
fully established in the minds and hearts of men, 
then was the whole prophecy fulfilled, the kingdom 
restored to Israel, the glory to Zion, and Jerusalem 
rebuilt ; and this, though the children of Israel 
according to the flesh, were dispersed to the utter- 
most parts of the earth, the natural Jerusalem 
a heap of ruins, and the literal Zion razed to its 
foundations. 

It is even so with the Holy City, New Jerusa- 
lem, which was to descend out of heaven from 
God. As heaven in the Scriptural view is a spir- 
itual realm, whatever descends from thence must 



144 The Garden of Eden. 

be spiritual in its character. It is not visible to 
outward sight ; it comes to us within. And the 
New Jerusalem is but another term for Eden. It 
is a new dispensation of light and love. It is the 
doctrine of Eden retaught and the life of Eden 
restored. If we cannot see this by intuition, there 
is one fact which shows it clearly ; it is that the 
peculiarities of Eden reappear in the New Jeru- 
salem. When John in vision looked up, he saw 
a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, pro- 
ceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. 
Natural rivers do not proceed from visible thrones ; 
they well up from hidden fountains in the earth. 
This, therefore, is the same river under a different 
name, which went forth in Eden. It is the same 
water of which our Lord spake when He said to 
the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well : ^' Whoso- 
ever shall drink of the water that I shall give him 
shall never thirst ; but the water that I shall give 
him shall be in him a well of water springing up 
into everlasting life." That was the new truth 
of the Gospel which, inwardly received, would be 
a well of spiritual wisdom that would so turn the 
current of the thoughts, affections and desires, as 
to prove a fount of everlasting life to w^homsoever 
should drink it. 

Such is the water that comes from above. It 
is spiritual truth. Such was the water that flowed 
from Eden. Such is that which in the New 



The Restoration. 145 

Jerusalem descends out of heaven from God. 
Can we have any truth which is not his ? Can 
we have any enlightenment except from Him ? 
The river of spiritual wisdom, in its refreshing of 
the understanding and its quickening of the life, 
flows always from Him. It is the river of Eden, 
the water of life, w^hose fountain-head is the 
throne of God and the Lamb. It flows to mind 
and heart; and it gives to him who receives it 
the power to live an intelligently holy life, and to 
perform the duties of existence not only in a 
rational way, but in the spirit and faith of Him 
in whose name it is done. This living water is 
^' clear §ls crystal.'^ There is nothing so clear to 
the receptive mind as spiritual truth. The natural 
mind does not think so ; but that does not alter 
the fact. The sun is not clearer in its shining, 
than the apprehension of divine truth by the 
spiritually aw^akened intellect. But as the facul- 
ties suited to the apprehension of mathematics, 
or music, or poetry, must be aroused before their 
higher truths become clear or cognizable, so must 
it be with truths of spiritual wisdom. Without 
the proper quickening of the spiritual faculties, 
these truths will remain obscure or altogether 
unseen ; with it, they will be pellucid as the 
mountain spring ; clear as transparent crystal. 

But in the Holy City w^as to be reproduced 
another feature of the Garden of Eden, and a 
13 K 



14G Tkc Garden of Eden, 

central one. ''In the midst of the street of it 
and of the river, on this side and on that, was 
the tree of life.'' I give the literal rendering of 
the original Greek, as preferable to the authorized 
version. This tree of life fixes the New Jerusalem 
as Eden restored. There is but one tree of life. 
It grew in the midst of the ancient garden, and 
it will grow again, not only in the midst of the 
street of the New Jerusalem, but in the midst of 
its river and on this side and on that. And the 
promise had already been recorded, '' To him that 
overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life 
which is in the midst of the paradise of God " 
(Rev. ii. 1). It is not which was in the midst of 
paradise, nor which will be there, but which is. 
The tree of life is of perennial growth. It 
always is ; it always was ; it always will be. It 
grows ever ready for the acceptance of man. The 
gates of paradise are perpetually open for the 
entrance of all, and the sacred tree forever stands 
laden with fruit for the sustenance of every 
hungry soul. But the profane cannot see it, and 
they think it does not exist. For them it does 
not ; for the wise and intelligent it does. 

Paradise is the kingdom of heaven. Call it by 
what name the Scripture may, Eden or the New 
Jerusalem, the tree of life grows in the midst of 
it ; and without that tree, it is not paradise at 
all. For the tree of life, as we have often said 



The Restoration. 147 

and shown, is the Lord as the central love and life 
of the soul. Now, having* this and partaking of 
the fruit of this tree, man is in Eden, in the king- 
dom of heaven, in the Xew Jerusalem, no matter 
what the age of the world or where hi.s dwelling 
place may be. 

Yet these expressions, though synonymous in 
a general sense, in a specific sense, especially as 
prophetic of different ages of the Church, have a 
somewhat different meaning. Eden refers, in a 
strict sense, to that state of innocent perfection 
of life which was characteristic of the most ancient 
Church. It vfas, in its goodness and w^isdom, of 
that peculiarly infantile or tender genius, which 
is past and gone and which can never on earth be 
exactly reproduced. The New Jerusalem is more 
properly that state of heavenly perfection in the 
Church at large, or in the individual heart, which 
has been attained' through severe conflict with 
evil in emerging from the baptism of hell. It will 
be compatible with the knowledge and possession 
of natural science, art and luxury, to which those 
primitive people were strangers. It will, there- 
fore, have a broader basis of natural knowledge. 
The two are similar states, but developed under 
different circumstances. This truth is alluded to 
for the purpose of taking note of the fact, that 
when different expressions are used in Scripture 
for a similar idea, thouprh thev mean the same 



148 The Garden of Eden. 

thing, they mean it under different phases. Thus 
while the New Jerusalem is a restoration of Eden, 
it will be of a different genius from the ancient 
Eden, because the people of whom it is to be 
composed will be of a different character, though 
of equal perfection. Tet it is not improper to 
use the term Eden, or any other Scripture term 
for the state implied by it, to describe the state of 
hearts and lives to-day that have attained to it, 
because all Scripture is applicable to all ages and 
to all hearts. 

This tree of life — the Lord with his matchless 
love — grows in the midst of the street of the New 
Jerusalem. The street, or to* use a more common 
phrase, the way or path of life, is the truth by 
means of which we walk. When our Lord says, 
'^ I will show thee the path of life,'' He means 
that He will point out to us the heavenly truths 
which shall constitute our daily walk, or show us 
how to live. The street of the New Jerusalem 
may just as well be translated its path. The tree 
of life is said, therefore, to grow in the midst of 
its street, because the Lord as love (or the love 
of the Lord) is the central principle of life to 
whomsoever comes to dwell in the New Jerusalem. 
All his life-walk turns to it ; all his desires and af- 
fections look to it. It is never out of his sight. 
It is before him whithersoever his steps tend, and 
in the very midst of his path. 



The Restoration. 149 

The tree of life was in the midst of the river 
also. This is a curious expression from a natural 
point of view, but a beautiful one spiritually con- 
sidered ; for it indicates that the Lord as love, is 
not only the central principle in the mind, and 
consequently in the path of life, of all the dwellers 
in the New Jerusalem, but that He is the central 
point (in the midst or center) of all their spiritual 
wisdom. The river of water of life, is the wis- 
dom of life made manifest to the mind as it flows 
into the understanding from the Lord ; and God 
and the Lamb — the invisible Divinity and the 
Divine Humanity — are the center of it. It all 
comes from the Lord — the glorified Christ ; it all 
looks to Him ; it regards Him in every turning 
of the thought. All principles, all truths, are 
Sowings forth from Him, and bear his image and 
superscription. The mind which, in all its medi- 
tations, never loses sight of the Lord as its central 
light and warmth, is the one in the midst of whose 
river of water of life, as it proceeds from the 
throne of God, the tree of life forever stands. 

And it is '' on this side and on thaf It is to 
the right and the left ; in heavenly considerations 
and earthly ; in states of light and in those of 
obscurity ; at church and at work. Under all cir- 
cumstances the tree of life is before the eyes, 
forming a part of every thought, entering into 
every motive, guiding in every act. ^* Guiding/' 
13^ 



150 The Garden of Eden. 

we say, ^'in every act,'' because it bare twelve 
manner of fruits. Twelve is a symbol employed 
when it is intended that the expression shall be 
all-embracing. Twelve manner of fruits is every 
kind of fruit which the tree of life is capable of 
producing. The fruits are good works. He in 
whose heart the tree of life is planted, bearing its 
twelve manner of fruits, is he who in all his works 
bears heavenly fruit, and all whose deeds are 
good. It is he, the entire works of whose life are 
the fruits of love — of that love whose center and 
source is the Lord ; of love which is all-embracing 
in its character ; of love which is holy, pure, un- 
selfish, overflowing with benevolence to all man- 
kind. 

Such a tree when planted in the heart, '* yields 
its fruit every month ;" because the Lord's love, 
when it is the soul's animating principle, produces 
works that are genuinely good in every changing 
state. ^' And the leaves of the tree are for the 
healing of the nations." Leaves signify the 
thoughts or rational intuitions of man ; and the 
leaves of the tree of life, or the thoughts of those 
in whom the love of the Lord is the ruling prin- 
ciple, are all good and for the good of all man- 
kind — for the healing of the spiritual diseases of 
themselves and all the world. 

And hoAV beautifully comes in the declaration, 
*' Blessed are they that do his commandments, 



The Restoration. 151 

that they may have right to the tree of life, and 
may enter in through the gates into the city.'' Is 
it not wonderful how many different ways have 
been held as essential to the obtaining of salva- 
tion ? Yet we have it here in its perfection. 
Who obtain it ? They who do the Lord's com- 
mandments. Simple, brief, and clear ! Yet it 
has been said that no one can keep the command- 
ments ; and that, therefore, faith alone is the way 
to salvation. But the tree of life is the Lord our 
love. That is what we need ; that is what we 
must receive. That is innocence, purity, bliss — 
the sum of all faith, hope and charity. That is 
salvation and eternal life. That is Eden, Beulah, 
Zion, the kingdom of heaven, the New Jerusalem. 
And the way to it is, doing the Lord^s command- 
ments. 

This is only a repetition of the Lord's words, 
^' He that hath my commandments and keepeth 
them, he it is that loveth me." Paul had grasped 
the truth when he said, ^^ Love is the fulfilling of 
the law." Eden was lost by breaking the com- 
mandments ; it will be regained by keeping them. 
The cherubim guard the tree of life from the hands 
of the profane. The flame of the sword, or the 
self-love of man himself, protects it from the touch 
of sensualism by rendering it unappreciated and ' 
unknown. But it is gained again, and our right 
to it is re-established, by the persistent effort to 



152 The Garden of Eden. 

obey the Lord's commands, or to live the life 
that He has taught us in his Word. 

Is it true that we cannot keep the command- 
ments ? We cannot, indeed, keep them of our- 
selves, or in our own strength. But it is ours to 
make the effort, and it is the Lord's to furnish the 
power. If we make the effort in earnest, the 
power is always sure to be supplied. If we lift 
no hand, make no exertion, raise no prayer, no 
strength comes. The Lord flows alwa3^s into 
active, never into passive agencies. Man is like 
the flowers. As they hold up their modest cups 
to receive the refreshing dew and the light of the 
morning sun, so must he look up, open his heart 
to the sweet influence of heaven, will to do the 
right as of himself, and then the Lord flows in 
with invigorating power. We can keep the com- 
mandments ; yet not in our own strength, for w^e 
have none. But Ave can if we seek the Lord's 
strength ; for He is the fullness of strength, and 
is ever ready and waiting to give us all we ask 
or really need. 

Briefly to sum up what has been said in these 
discoursed about the Garden of Eden, as viewed 
in its true spirit and interpreted by the science of 
correspondences : 

When the Lord created man at the first. He 
raised him up into a condition of love, purity, 
innocence, spiritual intelligence and happiness. 



TIlc Restoration, 158 

This state of life is called in his holy Word, the 
Garden of Eden. He placed in the midst of this 
garden — in the inmost of man's soul — the tree of 
life, which was Himself as the only love and life 
of man. To eat of this tree was to live in love 
to Him derived from Him. But he also endowed 
man with the gift of freedom ; because, not to be 
free was not to be man. In his freedom, and thus 
of his own motion, man, after a long period of 
happiness, turned from the Lord and his love, and 
began to live for self and from the love of self. 
This was eating of a tree, or living from a prin- 
ciple, of which the Lord had bidden him not to 
eat. It was the sensual principle, under the 
symbol of the serpent, which seduced him. Then 
man lost his blissful Eden, because he had departed 
from the Eden state ; and losing that, he lost the 
spiritual wisdom which belonged to it, and finally 
all knov/ledge that it ever w^as, and even the con- 
ception that it could be. So the race for long 
centuries groped in darkness, all oblivious of 
things spiritual and divine. 

True, the lamp was lighted and kept blazing in 
the inspired V/ord. But men's eyes were closed 
to its heavenly effulgence. The Word was a light 
shining upon closed and darkened minds that did 
not comprehend its meaning. '* The light shone 
in darkness, but the darkness comprehended it 
not." Our Lord came upon earth to showman 



lol^ Tlw (jlardnt of Eden, 

the way back, and encourage and assist him to 
return to his lost Eden. He was received by a 
few, yet his teachings were but partially com- 
prehended and dimly discerned. He has waited 
with mercy and long suffering for man — waited 
for him to develop into a state wherein he could 
receive the divine words in their true spiritual 
meaning. Then He raised up a messenger, 
Emanuel Swedenborg, whom He illumined with 
his wisdom, to reveal the mystery of Eden, of 
the kingdom of heaven, of the New Jerusalem ; 
to unfold in greater fullness the true nature of that 
wondrous spiritual life set forth in the divine 
Word for the restoration of man, and to make 
plain the true spirit of all He had hitherto taught. 

So v/e find the New Jerusalem of divine 
promise, to be but paradise restored. The rivers 
of Eden break out afresh in its golden streets ; 
the tree of life is growing by its river of living 
water ; all the blessings that man ever enjoyed, 
shall be his again ; all love, innocence, purity, 
wisdom and happiness, the river pure as crystal 
that flow^s from the throne of God, the tree of 
life with its healing leaves and heavenly fruit, 
will he but keep the Lord's commandments. 

The invitation is full and' free. "• Whosoever 
will, let him take the water of life freely.'' The 
water of life is the truth of God's holy Word ; — 
of the Word as apprehended, not in the obscurity 



The Restoration. 155 

of the letter, but in the clear-shining of the spirit. 
If it were truth only, mere knowledge and doc- 
trine, it were not much. But there, in the midst 
of it, is the life itself. There is the Tree of Life, 
the Lord our love ; there are its fruits of every 
hue ; there are its leaves for the whole w^orkVs 
healing. And they are all parts of a heavenly 
whole. They are all divine. We can spare no 
portion of them. Doctrine is for our teaching ; 
but we are taught it that we may live it. Truth 
is for our enlightenment ; but it becomes our con- 
demnation if we fail to walk in the light of it. It 
is only by living or doing as the truth requires, 
that our hearts are opened to the reception of the 
fruit of that immortal tree which is forever in the 
midst of the paradise of God. 

Well, here is a condition of life w^e all ardently 
desire. The Xew Jerusalem is a state of spiritual 
life and wisdom. It is Eden restored. Its joys 
are for both worlds, the present and the world be- 
yond. Its universal attainment will banish vrrong, 
disorder, unrest, sorrow and sighing, from the 
earth. Its attainment by each heart, will banish 
them from thence. And when we ask. Lord, who 
shall have it ? the answer comes echoing through 
the corridors of the soul, '' Whosoever wall I '' 

If there is a blessing that is worth gaining, it 
is this ; if a life that is worth living, it is this ; 
if a peace worth striving for, it is this. Shall we 



156 The Garden of Mien. 

not take the lesson to our hearts, and make it the 
theme of deep and solemn reflection, and of sin- 
cere and earnest prayer ? Shall we be thought- 
less of that which is of so much higher import 
than any mere worldly things ? or indifferent to 
that which the Lord regards as worthy our su- 
preme effort? Let us reflect. Let us do more, — 
lift up our hearts to the throne of grace, and pray 
that we may be more earnest, more humble, more 
devoted — more believing, loving and obedient. 




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